authors guild

A Writing Career: Pitching, Persisting, Getting Ahead, Getting Paid

and Staying Out of Trouble

New York City Passes Landmark Freelancer Law

What the Trump Presidency Could Mean for Writers

A U T H O R S G U I L DWinter 2017 B U L L E T I N

AUTHORS GUILD BULLETIN 2 WINTER 2017

New York City Passes Landmark Bill to Protect Freelance WorkersBy Brandon Reiter

Let’s start with some good news. On October 27, New York’s City Council voted unanimously in favor of the “Freelance Isn’t Free Act,” providing

freelance workers with an unprecedented set of legal protections against client nonpayment. Under the bill, anyone hiring a freelance worker for a project valued at $800 or more over a four-month period will have to agree, in writing, to a contract that clearly outlines the scope of the work, the agreed-upon rate, the method of payment, and the payment deadline. Employers will be required to pay their freelance workers in full no later than 30 days after the paid-on date. Just like free-lancers pay their monthly phone bills, cable bills, rent or mortgage. The bill, signed by Mayor Bill de Blasio November 16, will go into effect in April.

The legislation is the first of its kind—a milestone for freelancers’ rights and the first serious challenge to the inequities of the Gig economy. While the workforce of the past consisted mostly of employees who were or could be protected by unions—a significant segment of today’s workforce is made up of independent con-tractors. Current estimates of the freelance share of the market range from 15 to 30 percent, with the expecta-tion of continued expansion, placing freelancers in a unique position to capitalize on shifts in the economy, but also at the risk of being short-changed.

According to a 2015 survey by the media tech com-pany Contently, the median income for full-time free-lancers was $20,000 to $30,000. Compare that to the annual mean wage in the U.S. of $47, 230 and it’s clear that freelancers are not being paid a fair share—and in many cases they are not being paid at all. Meanwhile, the Freelancers Union, a 300,000-member national group based in New York and the driving force behind the Freelance Isn’t Free Act, reports that freelancers—a cohort made up of a wide range of independent pro-fessionals in the creative arts, including non-staff jour-nalists and authors, the tech industry, designers and consultants—contributed a trillion dollars to the na-tional economy.

The additional finding by the Freelancers Union, that seven out of ten freelancers experience difficulty

collecting payment at some point in their careers—and are stiffed an average of $6,000 annually—will come as no surprise to many writers. One of the Guild’s most significant advocacy efforts in the last two decades was the $18 million class action suit we filed alongside the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the National Writers Union, and 21 freelance writers in 2000, on behalf of thousands of freelance writers who had been paid by major newspapers and magazines for one-time use of their articles, and then saw their work swept into electronic databases without further compensation. (The case was settled in the plaintiffs’ favor in 2005 but various court challenges have de-

layed final distribution for a decade.) Over the last decade, prominent digital media out-

lets have had wholesale success in normalizing a com-parable non-compensation ethic, peddling the gospel of “exposure” in place of a pay check in a very tight market for writers. The Huffington Post, which is hugely profitable by any standards (the company, which was sold for $315 million in 2013, generated revenues of $146 million in 2015) has long been viewed as one of the more egregious and unrepentant offenders when it comes to making money with free “content” donated by writers. In fact, the best thing one might say about Huffington’s practices is that they were no secret.

The popular website Vice, which began as a print magazine, was better known as a bait and switch outfit when it came to writing for its website. In an article published by the Columbia Journalism Review in August 2016, Yardena Schwartz described a pattern of decep-tion and stonewalling—publishing freelancers’ work without paying for it, offering assignments that were later rescinded, and seeking out fixers for help with their documentaries only to cut them off when the is-sue of payment was broached.

To say that freelance writers should never work for free would be an oversimplification, especially where those just entering the industry are concerned. No question, the benefits of writing for free some-

Continued on page 15

The legislation is the first of its kind—

a milestone for freelancers’ rights

and the first serious challenge to the

inequities of the Gig economy.


T H E A U T H O R S G U I L D B U L L E T I N

President Roxana Robinson

Executive Director Mary Rasenberger

Editor Martha Fay

Assistant Editor Nicole Vazquez

Staff Writer Ryan Fox

Copy Editor Hallie Einhorn

All non-staff contributors to the Bulletin retain copyright to the articles that appear in these pages. Guild members seeking information on contributors’ other publications are invited to contact the Guild office.

Published by:

The Authors Guild, Inc. 31 East 32nd Street 7th Floor New York, NY 10016

The Bulletin was first published in 1912 as The Authors League News letter.

O V E R H E A R D

“Surely you understand the role that meaningful intel-lectual property rights play in American entrepreneurial success, both at home and in global markets, as the ability to burnish the Trump brand through trademark registra-tion and enforcement has helped your diverse enter-prises to grow and thrive world-wide.”

— Allan R. Adler, Associ ation of American Publishers in a December 15 letter to then-President-elect Donald Trump.

W I N T E R 2 0 1 7

ARTICLES

A Freelance Landmark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2By Brandon Reiter

The Authors Guild Q&A: Paul W. Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9Advocacy News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

For the Record

An Unprecedented Dismissal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

A National Digital Library Authors Would Welcome . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

What the Trump Presidency Could Mean for Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

The Writing Life: What Authors Need to Know

Going It Alone: Submitting an Un-agented Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19By Tobias Carroll

The Art of the Pitch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21By Chadwick Moore

The Short, Sad Life of an Unsuccessful Novelist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23By Margaret Verble

Talking $$$$$: Writers Break the Last Taboo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25

Financial Management for Freelance Writers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27By the Electric Literature staff

Harlequin Lawsuit’s Happy Ending . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41By Patricia McLinn

DEPARTMENTS

Short Takes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4From the President . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6From the Home Office . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7Legal Watch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30Members Make News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32In Memoriam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35Books by Members . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST

Kevin Sanchez Walsh is a freelance artist and longtime contributor to the Bulletin. He can be reached at [email protected].

Copyright © 2017 The Authors Guild, Inc.


SHORT TAKESCampus Bookstores Mix It UpFaced with federal, state and institu-tional budget cuts, soaring textbook prices, and a print-resistant genera-tion of students, college bookstores have been rethinking how they do business for some time. In a 2014 survey, 65 percent of students said they had decided against buying a textbook because it was too expen-sive, and 82 percent said they felt they would do better in their studies if course textbooks were available free online and buying a hard copy were optional.

To meet these expectations, cam-pus bookstores are trying out a va-riety of new business models. Some schools, including the City Colleges of Chicago, Stony Brook University and American University, have moved course material sales online and are working with third-party vendors. Others are employing hy-brid models, providing lower-cost books and materials online while selling services, branded merchan-dise, food and bestsellers in their brick-and-mortar stores to make up the difference. Companies such as Sidewalk, Chegg, RedShelf and Verba Software provide rental ser-vices and digital content strategies designed to lower costs for stripped-down campus bookstores.

Jonathan Shar, the chief market-ing officer for Akademos, a company that provides virtual bookstores for colleges, told Publishers Weekly that the transition to digital plat-forms had accelerated. “In the last 18 months,” he said, “we’ve launched more virtual bookstores than in the entire history of the company.”

Many colleges are forming part-nerships with corporations such as Barnes & Noble—which has long had experience in the aca-demic market and currently op-erates 770 campus stores—and with Amazon. According to the

to remind you that many more are flourishing and your support is vital to their success.”

In this case there was a silver lin-ing. The same day that BookCourt announced it was closing, bestsell-ing author Emma Straub—a former BookCourt employee—announced that she and her husband, Michael Fusco, had secured initial funding to open a bookstore called Books Are Magic nearby. “A neighborhood without an independent bookstore is a body without a heart,” Straub wrote on her website. “And so we’re building a new heart.”

Supply LineTelevision programs based on books and novels are a booming indus-try, and after several notable hits in 2016 (FX’s adaptation of Jeffrey Toobin’s Ride of His Life: The People v. OJ Simpson being the ratings stand-out) there will be more coming this year. Online streaming platforms are continuing to ramp up their origi-nal programming while traditional broadcast and cable networks re-main major players as well, creat-ing a great demand for new source material that books are helping to fill. Some of the more notable shows debuting this year include: A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (Netflix, January), Legion, based on a comic book character created by Chris Claremont (FX, February), Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (HBO, February), The Hand maid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (Hulu, April), Midnight, Texas by Charlaine Harris (NBC, April), Ameri can Gods by Neil Gaiman (Starz, TBA), Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (HBO, TBA), and The Terror by Dan Simmons (AMC, TBA).

Ballots and BooksThe word in the book business for much of 2016 was that sales were down because readers were just too distracted by the upcoming election

National Association of College Stores, Amazon now owns 23 per-cent of the college textbook market. Students can compare prices on Amazon’s site and have the mate-rials delivered to campus, but they don’t get the level of customer ser-vice they would in a physical cam-pus bookstore. Meanwhile, schools partnering with Amazon receive a percentage of the sales on their website, an institutional bonus of the shift away from the brick-and-mortar model. Purdue University’s Robert D. Wynkoop told The Chronicle of Higher Education that since 2014, the university had made $1 million from the partnership. By the end of 2016, Amazon will have pickup locations in 17 schools.

One Bookstore Closes, Another BloomsAfter 35 years as a gathering place for writers and readers in book- loving Cobble Hill, BookCourt, one of Brooklyn’s most successful in-dies, announced it was closing at the end of 2016. The online real estate magazine Curbed New York noted that the store’s “demise is unusual in that it wasn’t driven by rent hikes, even though Court Street, where it’s located, is one of the most expen-sive retail strips in the country.” The reason rent didn’t enter in is that BookCourt owners Henry Zook and Mary Gannett, who started out as renters, bought their patch of Brooklyn many years ago. The two recently sold the property for $13.6 million and plan to retire.

In an open letter, Zook and Gan-nett expressed their gratitude to their loyal customers. Acknowl-edging that the store’s closing will “leave a void in the neighborhood and industry,” they wrote, “We en-courage everyone reading this to find and support other indie book-stores, here in Brooklyn or wherever you may be. While bookstores do close for various reasons, we want


The New York Times, to recount the formative role books played in his life and presidency. He spoke of how the works of fellow leaders—Lincoln, King and Gandhi among them—gave him a sense of solidar-ity at times he might otherwise feel isolated. He also singled out works of fiction like the Chinese writer Liu Cixin’s sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem, and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.

Once out of office, the author of Dreams from my Father and The Audacity of Hope told Kakutani he plans to take out a yellow legal pad and begin work on his presidential memoirs. “He has a writer’s sensi-bility,” Kakutani wrote, “a novelist’s eye and ear for detail, and a precise but elastic voice capable of moving easily between the lyrical and the vernacular and the profound.”

One imagines he won’t be em-ploying a ghostwriter.

Publishing Trends Identified at Digital Book World ConferenceDigital Book World, an annual con-ference on publishing strategies and the digital marketplace, was held in New York City from January 17–19. In the conference keynote, Macmillan CEO John Sargent fore-cast that 2017 will see a shrinking of the digital publishing market. Sargent identified a focal point of digital change in the higher educa-tion sector, which saw a 12% drop in net sales in 2016 despite the fact it usually grows every year. Current higher-ed offerings, Sargent noted, are too expensive for many students, and the market itself is inefficient, leading him to predict higher-ed as one market where the shift to digital could increase revenues and profits.

As if on cue, British-owned edu-cational publisher Pearson issued its fifth profits warning in four years the next day. The textbook giant also announced a plan to sell off its stake

gion, but we’ve kind of changed our tune on that a little bit nowadays. . . . We just think it’s time to stand up and say let’s all think about the ba-sic things we care about, like being good to each other, don’t discrimi-nate, be welcoming to everybody.”

Left Bank Books in St. Louis, which launched a “Ferguson Reads” program in 2014, offered both a children’s list of recommended titles (Maya Angelou’s Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, Faith Ringgold’s We Came to America) and an adults’ list (J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Carol Ander son’s White Rage: The Un-spoken Truth of Our Racial Divide.)

How much of a boost the election gave any of these authors is any-one’s guess, but one author did very well indeed that first week. Within 24 hours of the final vote count, CBS reported that Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal had “soared from No. 1,107 to No. 24, while Great Again went from 5,340 to 172.”

A week before the inauguration, after Congress man John Lewis of Atlanta announced that he would not be attending Trump’s swearing in, then President-to-be Trump re-sponded with a pair of angry tweets. Within hours Lewis’s graphic novel trilogy, March—the third volume was awarded the National Book Award last November—shot up to No. 1 on Amazon. His Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (with Michael D’Orso) rose to No. 3, book one of the March Trilogy was No. 4, and all three had sold out on Amazon’s site by the end of the weekend.

President Obama, Belletrist-in-ChiefIt could be a while before we see a president committed to the written word the way Barack Obama was, as both a reader and a writer.

Shortly before leaving office in January, Obama sat down with Michiko Kakutani, book critic for

to sit still anywhere but in front of a television. Starting November 9, hope flickered once again as pundits and booksellers started recommend-ing titles to console or inspire those suffering from electoral whiplash.

NPR’s Rachel Martin did a seg-ment with Weekend Edition books editor Barrie Hardymon, who rec-ommended four political power play novels—Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and Robert Graves’s I, Claudius and Claudius the God—along with Russell Hoban’s dystopic Riddley Walker and Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders, about the bubonic plague.

On New York magazine’s list—“12 Books We’re Reading to Help Us Understand the Election Result”—were One of Us: The Story of a Massa-cre in Norway—and Its After math by Åsne Seierstad, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Wesley Lowery’s They Can’t Kill Us All: Fer-guson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Move ment, and George Packer’s The Un winding: An Inner History of the New America.

Meanwhile, the American Book-sellers Association (ABA) reported booksellers around the country were “embracing their roles as sources of information and expression and as a community nexus.” A Facebook dis-play of children’s books by Jennifer Green, owner of Green Bean Books in Port land, OR, included the mes-sage: “Diversity makes us all bet-ter! We challenge you to read a book about someone very different than yourself.”

“We had a lot of people coming in the weekend after we put it up just to thank us for doing it and buy-ing a lot of books on the display,” said Green. ”I think people needed a place to go that felt safe, and I think bookstores really heard that.”

In a conservative neighborhood in Vancouver, WA, Vintage Books owner Becky Milner told ABA, “We always made it a point not to talk with customers about politics or reli- Continued on page 12


publishers. By choosing to lose money on every low-priced book they sell, they have artificially depreci-ated book prices until the public has come to believe that books actually have very little monetary value. They’ve lowered prices to a point at which bricks-and-mortar stores can’t compete, and many of those have gone out of business.

Amazon has become a monopoly as a seller of books, but that in itself is not against the law. Laws change, but at the moment it seems that being a monop-oly isn’t in itself illegal, as long as you don’t cause harm to your customers. You can engage in price-gouging and predatory pricing, causing economic harm to your competitors, as long as you give your customer lower prices and faster delivery than your competition does.

But those prices I was shown for Reminiscences were clearly not the lowest prices available. Amazon was offering me the book for very high prices, at the same time that they were offering it to Abigail at a very low price.

I rarely use Amazon, but I do so when I’m looking for books for my research. Since they’ve taken over the Used and Antiquarian markets, I’ve had to go to them for these books, and I’ve been known to pay a good deal for a hard-to-find volume. Amazon, of course, remembers this: their algorithms keep track of every-thing. They know I’ve been known to pay $50 or $60 for a book, so I guess they thought they’d show me that sort of price.

This is what’s called price-discrimination. It’s a pricing strategy based on the fact that different people will pay different prices for products. We all under-stand that this is true in theory: of course you know that you might be willing to pay more for shoes than your neighbor does. But are you willing to pay more than your neighbor does for the same pair of shoes?

Price discrimination isn’t illegal, but how does it make you feel about Amazon? Now, every time you’re about to click on “Buy,” you may wonder if someone else is getting the same book for less. Why should you pay more?

I kept checking the prices on Amazon. And Ama-zon kept checking on me. After two weeks, they had noticed that I wasn’t buying the book for $57.27. Suddenly, on January 17, a used paperback was only $3.88. Maybe they’d decided that I wasn’t going to be a buyer at that level, so they thought they’d offer me a different deal.

It’s the algorithms, I suppose, hard at work. It’s the algorithm that decides what the price will be, at all those wholesalers. There may not be any “real” price,

From the PresidentHow Much Will You Pay for This Book?By Roxana Robinson

I’ve been doing research for a new book lately, and I’ve hired a graduate student

to help me. Last winter I was drawing on a Civil War book, and I wanted my assistant, Abigail, to be able to read it too. The book, Reminiscences of Confederate Service, by Fran-cis Warrington Dawson, had been privately published

in the nineteenth century, and then published more recently for the general public by LSU Press. I asked Abigail to buy a copy for herself; I was sure it would be easily available through Amazon.

I checked to see. On January 3, 2016, Amazon of-fered me a long list of sources for new and used pa-perbacks. A used copy of the paperback, in good condition, was $37.50. A used copy that, I was warned, might contain highlighting, was $44.58. I was surprised by the high prices. I emailed Abigail and told her not to buy a copy. I didn’t want her to have to pay so much.

She said she’d already ordered one. Hers had cost less than ten dollars.

Where did you find it? I asked. Amazon, she said.I went back and looked again. The sites offering the

books sounded like wholesalers, and all their prices were identical, or nearly so. They were probably job-bers, who had bought their copies cheap when the publisher cleared stock from its warehouse. But they were offering it at sky-high prices. These were the sources that Amazon offered me. So where had Abigail found her book?

On January 11, at 9:52 AM, the price of a new pa-perback was $56.97. On January 17, at 12:08 am, the used paperback was $47.74.

Curious, I went to the LSU Press site. On that same day, January 17, I found the book was still in print. A new paperback was $16.95. So why hadn’t Amazon in-cluded LSU Press—which in fact distributes through Amazon—in the sources it showed me?

We know what Amazon has done to the American book market. It has deliberately forced down the prices of all books by demanding steep discounts from

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From the Home OfficeDear Authors Guild Members,

By the time you receive this winter 2017 edition of the Bulletin, the tumultuous and unsettling year of 2016 will be history. Here at the home office, we’re looking forward to the challenges and op-portunities 2017 is certain to bring. Paradoxically, writing for one’s livelihood in some ways has never been harder (it’s harder to earn money as a

freelancer, harder to get decent book advances, and the work of marketing and promotion falls more and more on authors’ shoulders) or easier (anyone can publish online, and any author can directly reach her readers). One indelible lesson of the year: in this age of false news generated in 140-character bites, writing book-length works is more important than ever.

Through the history of the printed word, all great societies have one thing in common: they have valued their writers. Writers help us understand our world better, both our present and our past; books help us assemble truths from contemporary culture and from history and they guide us into our future. They tell us who we are, and who we can be. As writers of both fiction and nonfiction, you—all of you—introduce new ideas into the culture and give us new language to discuss and debate them; you tell the stories and provide the information that helps us both understand ourselves and relate better to others. Your books help make sense of our collective experience. They make us think. It is troubling that present-day America seems to be increasingly indifferent to the importance of writers, and, I fear, we are already seeing the results.

Our founders understood just how important books were to the new system of government they created. They believed that a government “of and for the people” works only if the people are educated about the issues of the day so they can make rational decisions in their civic lives. As James Madison said (in a quote inscribed on the Madison Building of the Library of Congress):

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own Governours, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

The founders recognized that to be successful, a democracy needs an informed citizenry, and to ensure that its people were sufficiently informed, the United States needed its own class of writers, thinkers, and artists, not beholden to government or private patron-age. (It’s hard to imagine, but there were few published American writers at the time, in large part because the copyright protection afforded by the colonies was so new.) And so our founders enshrined copyright law in the Constitution, specifically to ensure that authors would always have a federal right to earn money from their writing.

There are times, even in a democracy, when writ-ers have a particularly important role to play; and this appears to be one of those times. As Thomas Friedman says in his new book, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations:

Our democracy can work only if voters know how the world works, so they are able to make intelligent policy choices and are less apt to fall prey to demagogues, ideological zealots, or con-spiracy buffs who may be confusing them at best or deliberately misleading them at worst. As I watched the 2016 presidential campaign unfold, the words of Marie Curie never rang more true to me or felt more relevant: “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”

Now, we find ourselves in the “post-truth” era, where “truth” can be fabricated by zealots, candidates, politicians, and even other countries trying to influ-ence our political discourse, and then spread like wild-fire through the channels of social media. What does that mean for our near and long-term future? How can we fight back?

Writing has always been and remains an utterly effective way to fight against untruths. If falsehood is a way to subjugate, then critical thinking is a path to freedom. Being able to distinguish fact from falsehood is an essential tool for citizens in a democracy, and writing and reading are the foremost ways to teach the critical thinking tools necessary to make these judg-ments.

Today as much as ever (and maybe more so given the recent uptick in fake news, misinformation, and the tendency to find ourselves in information silos), our citizenry needs the full access to truth that only writers—of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry alike—can provide.

Here at the office we’ve been doing what we can to make sure you can keep doing your job in an opti-


mal environment. As part of the Copyright Alliance’s Transition Working Group, for example, we’ve been working to ensure that the President-Elect’s transition team has information about the best candidates for copyright-related posts—individuals who understand the importance of allowing authors to decide when, how and at what price their works are distributed by others, as well as to ensure that the incoming adminis-tration realizes the importance of creators to our econ-omy and their need for protection.

We continue to work with Congress on legisla-tion that will help creators and authors specifically, including the creation of an independent Copyright Office that will promote authors’ rights, the creation of a small claims copyright court to resolve infringe-ment claims inexpensively and efficiently (the need for

which any author who has had to give up a claim of infringement because of the cost of litigation will read-ily understand), and to address the threats the creative industries face from digital piracy. In addition, we are gaining ground and allies in our efforts to educate lawmakers about the realities and dangers of continu-ing to allow supersize tech platforms to reap the bulk of the financial benefits from creative content.

As for your part, in today’s culture of misinforma-tion your work is more important than ever. So please keep writing. Own your voice. Fight back by letting the truths in your stories, poems and essays speak for themselves.

Onwards,

Mary Rasenberger Executive Director

The Authors Guild, in keeping with its cornerstone commitment to support free speech, has joined the Media Coalition, a nonprofit association dedicated to protecting First Amendment rights. The coalition, founded in 1973, looks to provide a unified voice for all stakeholders whose work depends upon First Amendment protections. It advises legislatures on pending legislation, files legal challenges and am-icus briefs and advocates publicly for preserving free speech. Since the Guild will be particularly en-gaged in issues of freedom and diversity of expres-sion in the coming year, our coalition membership should prove timely and invigorating.

In becoming part of the Media Coalition, the Guild joins the literary organizations American Booksellers for Free Expression (a subgroup of the American Booksellers Association), the Association of American Publishers, and the Freedom to Read Foundation, as well as organizations representing other media, such as film, software and comic books.

The work of the Media Coalition is exemplified by its recent defense of a local bookstore owner in Saugerties, New York. Brian Donoghue, the owner of the Inquiring Minds Bookstore, had put up a display in his window featuring books about then–presidential candidate Donald Trump and about the history of Nazi Germany, a banner with Trump’s

name over a swastika, and a quotation about the dangers of not speaking out against hate. After Donoghue received zoning citations, the Media Coalition Foundation provided him with an attor-ney who informed the village that the citations were in violation of Donoghue’s First Amendment rights, and ultimately, he was able to keep the display up through Election Day, after which he decided to re-move it.

The Authors Guild has worked with the Media Coalition Foundation before, most recently in July when both organizations joined a friend-of-the-court brief supporting a First Amendment challenge to an Idaho law prohibiting the clandestine record-ing of factory farming practices. The brief argued that the law is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech and, specifically, on investigative journalism. The case is before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and has yet to be decided.

In the face of what appears to be an increasingly hostile environment for journalists, it will be im-portant for authors, publishers and distributors of all types of media to vigorously protect their First Amendment rights. The Guild looks forward to be-ing a part of the Media Coalition as we continue to protect freedom of expression for our members and authors everywhere.

The Guild Joins the Media Coalition


The Authors Guild Q&A: Paul W. MorrisAG Vice President of Programming and OutreachThe Guild’s newest staff member joined us in early November, di-rect from PEN America, where his most recent job was as Director of Literary Programs. In December, he sat—roughly speaking—for an interview with Isabel Howe, Exec-utive Director of the Authors League Fund and Bulletin contributor.

Welcome to the Authors Guild. In November you joined us as vice president of programs and outreach. This is a new position for the Guild. What will your job entail?

Thanks. I’m really excited to be coming on board at this moment in time. There are so many won-derful works being published right now, online, in print, via e-books, etc. And there’s so much work to be done in service to these authors.

I’m energized and enthusias-tic about supporting the Guild’s mission of advocating for writ-ers’ rights and fair pay, not to mention free speech, which is something that everyone, not just writers, needs to be vigi-lant about these days. I think the conversation surrounding intel-lectual property will become increasingly relevant in the next few years. It feels as if we are still very much in the early stages of our understanding of IP, as the general public comes to terms with what it means to give away one’s content and what is at stake when we don’t place the necessary value on content. Writers and artists need to be on the front lines of that conversation, and the Authors Guild exists to guaran-tee that they will continue to be.

My immediate goal in the months ahead is to en-sure the continued vitality of our membership and

expand its range and diversity. Our members are our core, without whom we cannot be as vocal or effective in our advocacy work. I hope to expand our member-ship base with innovative outreach efforts to new and existing writing communities. I want to offer members multiple opportunities to come together and learn from one another as peers, and also to connect with publishing professionals.

We exist in a diverse and in-terdependent ecosystem, and although we are increasingly networked online, I still believe in the power of congregating in person. So I look forward to or-ganizing live gatherings across the country, along with partner-ships with other literary organi-zations and cultural institutions, bookstores, writing residencies and MFA programs nationwide.

Can you tell us a bit about your background? How did you come to work on the writers’ side of publishing?

Well, first off, I’m a lifelong reader and lover of literature. That’s in my blood. I wasn’t ter-ribly social as a child, despite having siblings on either side of me. I preferred solitude to social-izing and would often hole up in my room reading, my face stuck in a book on family vacations. My mother would joke that you needed a library card just to en-ter my room. (I still hoard books to this day.) I used to think I would be an English teacher so I could share this passion with my students. I had several influ-ential teachers myself, who in-spired and encouraged me along these lines. But I also loved the idea of being a writer, and I se-

cretly thought I might become one, one day.I didn’t end up teaching, and I only halfheartedly

made a go at the writer’s life. I had some essays pub-lished while working on longer-term projects that I could never fully realize. Instead, I got into publishing, the result of a college internship. This paved the way for my first job in New York, as an editorial assistant at Viking Penguin. I bounced around as an editor for a decade, moving from books to magazines and back

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“My immediate goal in the months

ahead is to ensure the continued

vitality of our membership and

expand its range and diversity.

Our members are our core.”

—Paul Morris


cited to have a more focused mandate now, namely, increasing visibility of the Guild’s mission for authors of all kinds, not only those considered to be “literary,” and supporting them at all stages of their careers.

What existing Guild programs are you most enthu-siastic about? What kind of new programming for members would you like to see us do more of?

In terms of programming, I want to capitalize on the great work that has been going on all along, thanks to the Guild’s amazing staff. It’s very heartening to be working alongside such dedicated colleagues, and I look forward to collaborating with them to create a roster of events and programs that speaks to the needs of our members. The recent partnership with Electric Literature was a home run for the new Emerging Writer Membership level, which promises access to workshops, seminars, networking events and original

content geared specifically for up-and-coming writ-ers. Electric Lit is a fantastic online resource and dig-ital publisher, and an excellent partner, so I’d like to bolster that relationship and others like it. Our recent “Answer Time” on Tumblr was wildly successful, and I hope we continue to find innovative ways to reach new readers using digital channels.

The slate of programs we have lined up for 2017 is impressive and ranges from webinars offering prac-tical legal advice to a one-of-a-kind conversation be-tween Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Ta-Nehisi Coates in February. I would like to add some network-ing events for writers and publishing professionals, specifically one with agents, who have proven to be key in terms of recruitment and helping communicate our mission to their clients. I’d also love to involve art-ists working in other disciplines and explore cross-dis-ciplinary conversations. Writers take their inspiration from so many fields, and I think it would be illuminat-ing to give them the opportunity to discuss influences beyond other writers.

I believe there is a balance to be struck between of-


again, before ending up more squarely in nonprofit arts administration and community engagement— including at PEN America—working collaboratively with writers, editors and literary organizations to champion new writing and the love of reading. Any creativity that I might have put into teaching or writ-ing now finds its expression in this type of work. If my passion for books and writing can be infectious, then I’ll be doing my job.

How do you see your past jobs in publishing inform-ing your work with the Guild’s membership?

I count it as a true privilege to serve writers and the publishing community at large. I have met and be-friended writers who were once my idols, and have immense respect for the discipline and vision it takes to be a writer. My admiration for their dedication to the craft fuels my efforts to advocate for them, and, espe-cially, for emerging writers, who always need oppor-tunities to advance their careers when they’re starting out. By putting that energy into benefiting the Guild’s members, fostering community and connections, I’ll be happy to have contributed to the distinguished his-tory of the organization.

PEN America and the Authors Guild have an over-lapping membership, but their respective focuses have been very different, historically. What experi-ences from PEN do you think will be most helpful in your work with the Guild?

The primary mission of PEN America, being a chapter of PEN International, is rooted in global human rights advocacy, which is essential work. The Guild’s mission is more focused on the practical life of professional writers, and U.S. writers, specifically. To that end, my experience in the publishing industry, both at PEN and during the decade preceding it, will guide me as I find new allies and partners to work with the Guild in protecting copyright and ensuring fair compensation. Generally, I would like to stay the course of my career arc by continuing to provide authors with more oppor-tunities to sustain their professional writing lives.

Along those lines, is there anything you will have to leave behind from your past job experiences?

At PEN, I helped to elevate the prestige and relevancy of its large literary awards program, which hon-ors books and literary achievement across multiple genres. Awards and prizes are wonderful occasions to recognize literary merit, and many organizations do that very well. However, it took an enormous amount of resources each year and often limited my ability to engage more fully with members’ needs, in terms of programs and advocacy opportunities. So, I am ex-

“I have immense respect for the discipline and

vision it takes to be a writer. My admiration

for their dedication to the craft fuels my

efforts to advocate for them.”


Same Old Song: Google Still Gobbling Up Books It Didn’t Buy to Improve Its Own ProductsGoogle has been at it again. The Internet giant has been feeding a set of 11,038 romance novels and thrill-ers into a neural network and using them to teach its computers fluent, natural-sounding language, thereby improving its search results and conversational style. The books in question—self-published titles originally made available for free online, under licenses that for-bade commercial use—were compiled by University of Toronto researchers for an unrelated project and copied wholesale by Google. In a September article in the Guardian, Richard Lea reported on the research Google is conducting, quoting several authors regard-ing the fact that Google neither asked permission to use their work nor offered to pay them for it.

“Is this any different than someone using one of my books to start a fire?” wondered Rebecca Forster, whose novel Hostile Witness was “borrowed” by Google. “I have no idea what their objective is. Certainly it is not to bring me readers.”

Authors Guild executive director Mary Rasenberger was quoted at length in the article, calling the Google sweep a “blatantly commercial use of expressive au-thorship” and making the case that the digital revo-lution should not come at the expense of authors’ rights to control uses of their work and to earn a liv-ing from those uses. “Why shouldn’t authors be asked permission, or even informed—not to mention com-pensated—before their work is used in this manner? There’s no doubt Google has the means to do so.”

Since the Supreme Court declined to review the Second Circuit’s fair use decision in Authors Guild v. Google, the Guild has expected to see more projects of this kind, which erode the exclusive rights specifically granted to authors in the Copyright Act. That’s why the Guild has been such a vocal advocate for a licensing- based solution for these types of new digital uses. A form of collective licensing for out-of-print books would let valuable research be conducted, but with the permission of authors themselves and under terms that could secure authors a much-needed revenue stream at a time when fair compensation for the use of their works seems to be harder to come by than ever.

“I take great pride in my craft,” Rebecca Forster

told The Guardian, “and perhaps [my book] was chosen because of that. . . . Or perhaps it was chosen because it was there, because it was free?”

Guild Files Brief in Georgia State Digital Books CaseOn December 9, the Authors Guild filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting a group of academic publishers in the Georgia State University (GSU) copy-right infringement case. The publishers sued GSU in 2008 for encouraging its faculty to provide students with free, unlicensed digital course packets contain-ing excerpts (often full chapters) of copyrighted books. Earlier case law held that photocopying excerpts of books for course packs was not fair use. The GSU case is currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit for the second time. In 2012, the district court held that most of Georgia State’s excerpt uses were fair, mainly because they were educational uses, and the court failed to find any market harm. On ap-peal, the 11th Circuit remanded the case to the lower court, which again found that most of the uses were fair. It is that decision that is now on appeal.

Among other things, the Guild’s brief made the case that the lower court, in deciding that many of those unlicensed uses were fair, failed to assess the harm these e-packets caused to the market for licensed and paid-for course packets. The brief focused on the harm to authors, namely lost licensing income. This is an extremely important case for the future of higher-educational licensing income.

Encapsulating the harm that the lower court’s deci-sion could have, Authors Guild Council member T. J. Stiles, in a statement included in the brief, wrote: “I am a professional. If my profession is destroyed by the courts, then the public will get the very limited bounty of being able to read my existing work for free—which it can already do at any public or academic library—but it will get no further works from me.”

California Autograph Resale Bill Has Booksellers WorriedIn an effort to combat the sale of fake autographs, the state of California has sowed confusion among bookstore owners who host in-store author sign-ings. In September 2016, California governor Jerry

A D V O C A C Y N E W S


in Penguin Random House, the largest of the Big Five U.S. publish-ers, citing an “unprecedented de-cline” of 30 percent net revenues in its North American education busi-

weight of law, however, and the situation is com-plicated by the fact she was voted out of office in November. Booksellers are currently organizing to lobby for an amendment to the bill.

Bi-Partisan First Step on Copyright Office ReformOn December 8, 2016, House Judiciary Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI), ranking member of the com-mittee, released their first policy proposal on areas of copyright law in need of reform. The proposal, which was issued in both a written statement and a video, addresses the need for the modernization and inde-pendence of the United States Copyright Office.

The proposal was described in the release as the first in what will be a series of proposals to amend the copyright law in those areas “where there is a poten-tial for consensus.” It suggests, among other things, that the Copyright Office should have autonomy over its budget and technology needs; that the Register of Copyrights should be subject to a nomination-and-confirmation process; that the Copyright Office should maintain a searchable, digital database of copyright records; and that the Office should host a small copy-right claims tribunal.

Copyright Office modernization—which the Guild has energetically supported—is a threshold issue for lasting copyright reform. We need a 21st-century Copyright Office to better serve authors in the digital economy and to ensure that copyright laws keep pace with technological developments.

In a press statement, the congressmen requested written comments from interested stakeholders by January 31, 2017.

The Guild is currently preparing comments, which will most likely have been submitted by the time you read this. For more on the issue, visit authorsguild .org ✦

Brown signed Assembly Bill 1570, Collectibles: Sale of Autographed Memorabilia. The bill, which went into effect on January 1, 2017, extended the reach of an al-ready existing law governing the sale of signed sports collectibles with a value greater than $5 to include all autographed memorabilia with a value greater than $5; this includes books. According to the law, such col-lectibles must be accompanied by an extensive certifi-cate of authenticity (COA) when sold.

Though the bill exempts goods purchased directly from the signer—meaning California authors will still be able to sell their own books at signings without having to include a COA—some California bookstore owners have expressed concern that the law could be interpreted to require bookstores to issue a certificate for every book sold and signed at these events (and, in accordance with the law, keep a copy on file for seven years). The administrative costs involved in doing so, bookstore owners worry, could render author signings impractical.

The catch is that the law’s COA requirement ap-plies only to “dealers,” whom the bill defines as those “principally in the business of selling or offering for sale collectibles.” Are bookstores “dealers” under this definition? The word “principally” in the definition of “dealer” was added to the bill in part to exclude mer-chants like booksellers, who don’t “principally” sell collectibles. Nonetheless, California booksellers didn’t want to take the risk.

So, California booksellers and other groups—the Authors Guild among them—contacted the office of the bill’s author, Assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang, seeking clarification. In late October, Assemblywoman Chang posted a letter on her Facebook page clarifying the intent of the law. “Both the letter and spirit of the law are clear that AB 1570 does not apply to booksell-ers,” she wrote. “Bookstores, both as they are under-stood generally and many who have communicated with my office [sic], are not principally in the business of selling signed collectibles any more than a conve-nience store.”

Assemblywoman Chang’s letter doesn’t carry the

Short Takes

Continued from page 5

trade publishing sales to be down a modest 1.3 percent, Stopler said. He noted, however, that sales re-main particularly strong in the adult coloring book category, which ex-ploded in the holiday 2015 season and remained strong throughout 2016 before slowing in the fourth quarter of 2016. ✦

ness, according to a report in the Financial Times.

Later on in the opening day of the DBW conference, Jonathan Stopler of Nielsen, a firm that tracks book sales data from over 20 com-panies across the industry, esti-mated that 2016 e-book sales will show a decline of 16 percent from 2015. Nielsen also expects total 2016


parent, that all interested parties will be consulted, and that representatives of individual creators would be included on an advisory committee.

In the course of the meeting, Ms. Rasenberger re-ported, it was clear that Dr. Hayden is personally sympathetic toward creators. She is an enthusiastic reader herself, and as head librarian of the Baltimore libraries, she oversaw programs with authors and worked closely with independent booksellers. Ms. Rasenberger expressed the Guild’s desire to work with the Library to encourage literacy, access to books, and engagement with readers, especially at an early age. Additional areas of potential cooperation include the Guild working with the Center for the Book and other Library programs that involve author participation, and joining in the effort to create a national digital li-brary that does not rely on fair use alone, but would ensure that authors receive fair compensation for the use of their books.

In the coming year, the Guild will focus our energies on the effort to provide the Copyright Office with the

An Unprecedented DismissalIn response to the removal of Register of Copyright Maria Pallante from her position on October 21, the Authors Guild posted two statements on its website. The first appeared on October 24; the second appeared on October 28. The two texts have been combined and edited for length here.

On October 21, Maria Pallante, the Register of Copy-rights and Director of the United States Copyright Office, was abruptly removed from her post by the new Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, who had been sworn in a few weeks earlier. According to a statement issued by the Library of Congress, Dr. Hayden transferred Ms. Pallante to a newly created non-managerial position within the Library, Senior Advisor for Digital Strategy. Karyn Temple Claggett, an Associate Register, was appointed Acting Register of Copyrights.

We were disappointed to see Ms. Pallante go. She was a devoted leader of the Copyright Office, who launched several major initiatives during her tenure, including a full review of the Copyright Act to bring it into the 21st Century. She championed the moderniza-tion of the Copyright Office to better serve the evolv-ing needs of digital-era Copyright Office constituents, and after a comprehensive study, recommended the creation of a small claims tribunal that would allow authors and other creators to bring small infringement claims inexpensively, without having to hire a lawyer.

Ms. Pallante displayed an uncommon willingness to comprehend and balance the positions of all copy-right stakeholders. Especially important to the Guild was her conviction that, ultimately, the creative in-dustries cannot thrive without respect for individual creators. Under Ms. Pallante, the Copyright Office em-bodied the principle that copyright exists to benefit the public by incentivizing new works of authorship, and that the rights of individual creators must be respected for robust creative ecosystems to flourish.

The Copyright Act now states that the Register of Copyrights is subject to the direction and supervision of the Librarian of Congress and that regulations es-tablished by the Copyright Office are subject to the Librarian’s approval. It is the Guild’s long-standing belief that the head of the Copyright Office should be responsible for issuing copyright policy, and it is Guild priority to push Congress to modernize the Copyright Office and give it greater political, budgetary and IT independence from the Library. In recent months, leg-

islation has been introduced in the House that would modernize the Copyright Office and give it greater in-dependence from the Library. The Guild has endorsed this bill and continues to support this concept. [See page 12.]

A week after Ms. Pallante’s departure, Executive Director Mary Rasenberger met with Dr. Hayden at the Library of Congress in D. C. to express the Guild’s concerns about the future of the Copyright Office and the selection of the next Register.

Ms. Rasenberger and Dr. Hayden spoke at length about the search for a new Register. Dr. Hayden gave her assurance that the process will be open and trans-

It is the Guild’s long-standing belief that

the head of the opyright Of ce should be

responsible for issuing copyright policy,

and it is Guild priority to push Congress

to moderni e the Copyright Of ce and

give it greater political, budgetary and IT

independence from the Library.

F O R T H E R E C O R D


status and independence it merits given the crucial role copyright plays in our economy. We will fight to en-sure both that creators are represented in the search for the next Register of Copyrights and that the Librarian choses a Register who understands the utmost impor-tance of creators in the copyright ecosystem.

As it happens, the search for a new Register of Copyrights has already begun. In an unprecedented move, however, the Library of Congress first sought public input on the qualifications for the incoming Register and the issues he or she should focus on. While it is highly unusual for a government agency to solicit public input on the qualifications of a govern-

ment appointee, the Guild encouraged members to participate in the survey in order to keep the interests of creators at the fore throughout the process. Thanks to all members who submitted comments.

In the interim, we are pleased that Ms. Temple Claggett, Associate Register of Copyrights and Director of Policy and International Affairs for the United States Copyright Office, has agreed to serve as Acting Register while the search for a permanent replacement is underway. Ms. Temple Claggett is an astute and experienced copyright lawyer and manager and an excellent choice to lead the Copyright Office through this period of transition. We look forward to working with her. ✦

A National Digital Library Authors Would WelcomeIn response to an article in The New York Review of Books by cultural historian Robert Darnton, urging the creation of a national digital library to be housed in the Li-brary of Congress, Executive Director Mary Rasenberger submitted the following letter to the Review, outlining a framework for preserving copyright protections for authors.

November 10, 2016To the Editors:

The Authors Guild, the nation’s largest and oldest so-ciety of authors, agrees with Robert Darnton, in “The New Hillary Library?” (October 27), that a national digital library is both necessary and overdue. Authors share the dream of digitizing our nation’s literary heri-tage, but we must not ignore copyright in the process. Copyright is essential to authors and the future of lit-erature; it allows authors to earn a living from writing, ensuring that they can keep writing. A national digital library must preserve authors’ ability to earn a fair re-turn from their work.

Instead of building a national digital library by up-ending copyright, as Darnton proposes, there are solu-tions that will permit the type of public access Darnton describes, without undermining copyright’s incentives.

First, the Library of Congress, because of its status as our national library, is entitled to free copies of all U.S. published books; and for certain electronic mate-rials, it allows access through secure on-site terminals. The Library could designate premises in other librar-ies around the country where users could access elec-tronic materials from the Library’s collection. Minor legislation would allow the Library to digitize the col-lections and make them available for on-site access at the designated libraries.

Maria Pallante, former Register of Copyrights, to Head AAP

The Authors Guild welcomes the appoint-ment of Ms. Maria Pallante, the recent Register of Copyrights, as President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers (AAP). In her long and distinguished record of public service, Ms. Pallante had demonstrated a commitment to advancing the rights of creators. While serving as Register from 2011 to 2016, among her many ac-complishments, Ms. Pallante launched a compre-hensive review of the Copyright Act to identify areas of need in the existing legal and regulatory system, championed modernization programs that gave the Copyright Office resources to meet rapidly evolving technological demands, and in-troduced author-friendly proposals such as the small claims tribunal plan. Ms. Pallante has been a supporter of the rights of individual creators throughout her career, including stints at the Authors Guild and National Writers Union. We look forward to working with her in her new po-sition to address the challenges facing the author and publishing communities.


Second, a collective licensing system for books should be created to allow libraries to digitize and make books available, while compensating authors and publishers for those uses. Collective licensing systems are membership-based rights holder organi-zations formed to collect and distribute fees owed to rights holders, so that users don’t have to negotiate li-censes with each rights holder. They already exist in many other nations and could easily be implemented in the U.S. The compensation collected for authors and

publishers should be kept low enough to encourage li-braries to make use of the licenses.

A model that would work particularly well for mass digitization projects is an extended collective li-censing system, where a law is passed to extend the voluntary agreement reached among the collective to nonmembers among the same class of rights holder. This allows the collecting society to collect fees from libraries on behalf of all authors, unless an author ex-pressly requests that it not do so.

Short of an extended collective license, private li-censing regimes, though less comprehensive, are al-ready distributing funds. In the two decades since the Authors Guild launched the Authors Registry, for ex-ample, it has distributed over $30 million in secondary royalties from foreign countries to over eight thousand authors.

Last, we take issue with Darnton’s suggestion that there is no market for out-of-print books. On the con-trary, many platforms have arisen that make it easy for authors to sell titles whose rights they’ve reclaimed, and these have proven an important source of rev-enue for many authors, at a time when other sources of income are dwindling. Any responsible digitization project must be carefully tailored to avoid interfering with these markets.

What we need is a national digital library that does not simply rely on fair use, but fairly compensates au-thors for the use of their works—a library that benefits all parties: the writers and publishers who produce the books it consists of; the libraries who do such impor-tant work in carrying the torch of literacy; and most important, the reading public. ✦

“Authors share the dream of digitizing our

nation’s literary heritage, but we must not

ignore copyright in the process.”

Guild Comments on Deposit of Online-Only Works

On August 18, in response to a request for com-ments, the Authors Guild filed a statement with the United States Copyright Office on the question of whether online-only books should be required to be deposited with the Library of Congress.

Currently, all print books published in the United States must have two physical copies of the best edition of the work deposited with the U.S. Copyright Office for the use of the Library of Congress; books published only in electronic format, however, are exempted. Since online-only books are an important and growing part of our nation’s literary output, we took the position that they should indeed be eligible to be part of the collections of our national library. Because of the sheer volume of online-only titles published every year, however, and the burden that man-datory deposit of those titles would place on inde-pendently published authors, we recommended that such books not be required to be deposited with the Library of Congress, unless specifically requested by the Library.

times outweigh the loss of immediate income. But the Authors Guild believes the practice of media websites making money off of writers’ work and not paying them is shameful and helps no writers in the long run. Where possible, it is better to write for, and so encour-age, one of the online publishers that do pay fairly. To find out who generally pays what, visit one of the sev-eral websites that post the rates of online publishers. [See box, page 24.]

Meanwhile, with the passage of New York’s Free-lance Isn’t Free Act, the prospect of fair pay and fair terms for freelancers in all professions has been given a major boost. The New York victory is a testament to what can be accomplished when freelancers stand together, and the expanding freelance community is poised to become a powerful political constituency. It’s time to take this legislation into other cities and online, to ensure that freelance workers’ contributions to the economy are reflected in their employment and pay-ment practices as well. ✦

Bill to Protect Freelance Workers



On December 7, 2016, writer and journalist Douglas Preston, founder of Authors United—the grassroots group formed to protest Amazon’s treatment of au-thors in its 2014 dispute with publisher Hachette Book Group—contacted his group’s supporters to announce that Authors United would be join-ing forces with the Authors Guild Foundation to strengthen the Guild’s advocacy for a competitive and diverse publishing ecosystem.

“Authors United was an ad hoc group formed to give voice to the many writers harmed by Amazon’s retaliation against authors during the Hachette dis-pute,” said Preston, a member of the Authors Guild Council. “It was never my intention to run the orga-nization forever. Although the dispute was resolved a while ago, it was part of a much graver situation that is not going away. There are many threats to au-thors’ livelihoods in the new publishing economy: an unfair marketplace, rampant Internet piracy, the

‘information wants to be free’ lobby and their dot-com corporate partners, and threats to the free flow of ideas. I’ve asked the authors of Authors United to throw their support behind the Authors Guild, either by joining or making a contribution. With its one hundred–year history of advocacy, the Guild is the only organization out there with the resources, experience and energy to fight for authors’ rights—and to defend the literary culture of our country.”

“The Authors Guild’s nine thousand members are grateful for Doug’s efforts to band together au-thors and to stand up for their rights,” said Authors Guild president Roxana Robinson. “We welcome the writers who made up Authors United. We share their goals, and we’ll continue our fight until we see the changes needed to ensure that authors can con-tinue to produce the books that contribute so richly to our culture and our democracy.”

Authors United Joins Forces with the Authors Guild

at large. It will be exciting to launch it at a time when we’re feeling very divided as a country. The hope is that it will remind people of the power of stories to ex-plore new ways of thinking, foster empathy and intro-duce perspectives and environments we may not have yet encountered. Beyond that, I think members will be seeing a much more open and inclusive membership, one that represents the true diversity of books being published today. I’m excited to meet and hear from as many members as I can to better understand their needs in the year ahead.

Have you had a chance to read a book since you took on this job? Any recommendations?

I just finished Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun, which is a stunning debut. Her characters have these utterly original voices, so fully realized that I con-tinued to hear them in my head a week after I finished the book. It’s a remarkable novel, and I would highly recommend it as a gift this holiday season. I’m also a huge Neil Gaiman fan, and am eagerly anticipating a galley of his new one, Norse Mythology, landing on my desk in the next few weeks. That will be my win-ter reading for sure, along with Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad and Matthew Desmond’s Evicted. The past year was a great year for books, important books, and it’s so hard to choose these days. Definitely not a bad problem to have—now I just need to carve out the time. ✦

fering programs for emerging and recently published authors and serving our long-standing members who are eager to see where the Guild will invest its re-sources. I hope to survey the membership in early 2017 to find out exactly what they would most like to see us do. As we grow as an organization, it’s my strong feeling that we need to be not only inclusive, but also respectful of our history. Some of that history is con-cerned with free speech issues, specifically during the McCarthy era, when the Guild was especially ac-tive and vocal. We’ll be attentive to recent trends that could threaten the First Amendment and determine what role the Guild can play in advocating for writers. We’re launching a new series in 2017 that will solicit comments from a range of writers on what the First Amendment means to them. That should be enlighten-ing, and I’m hopeful that the results will illustrate the variety of perspectives that make up our membership.

What else will 2017 bring for Authors Guild mem-bers?

We’re in the initial planning stages of a national cam-paign that will engage Guild members by highlighting the importance of writers and their value in the culture

The Authors Guild Q&A: Paul W. Morris



What the Trump Presidency Could Mean for Authors

Immediately after the election, the Authors Guild re-ceived a number of inquiries about what the Trump administration might mean for authors and the

Guild’s advocacy efforts. In response, we’ve been ex-ploring the possible repercussions for the interests of writers, journalists and freedom of expression. Here’s what we’ve learned so far regarding where the presi-dent-elect might stand on some of the issues affecting working authors. The state of affairs changes quickly in the post-inauguration weeks; the information below is correct as we took the Bulletin to press, but readers are advised to check the Authors Guild website and our e-mail Newsletters for updates.

Freedom of SpeechOn the campaign trail and since the election, President Trump has shown little respect for the profound im-portance to our democracy of freedom of speech, free-dom of the press, media access and journalists. Along with journalists and other free speech advocates, we are alarmed by Trump’s often-expressed desire to sup-press critics. The Guild will continue to work with other organizations in the crucial fight to protect and ensure access to the White House and government agencies for all accredited journalists. We will also support the reintroduction and passage of a bipartisan federal free speech bill—the SPEAK FREE Act—and work to pre-vent Trump from vetoing it. The legislation, based on similar laws in more than half of our states, would al-low federal courts to dismiss unfounded lawsuits filed solely to punish people for speaking out. It just so hap-pens that this type of lawsuit (known as a “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” or SLAPP)—as well as the threat of such a suit—has been a favorite tactic in Trump’s business dealings.

Expect to see an uptick in our free speech advocacy. Some of our sister organizations, such as PEN America and the National Coalition Against Censorship, focus primarily on freedom of expression, and, while sup-porting their efforts, we have let them do much of the heavy lifting on these issues. But if any of Trump’s threats against journalists’ freedom of expression ma-terialize, directly challenging such threats will become a core part of our work in fulfillment of our 100-year-old mission.

Trump’s Relationship with the Tech SectorGoogle’s especially cozy relationship with the govern-ment and its remarkable influence on copyright policy (particularly in its efforts to limit copyright protection) appears to be coming to an end. Speculating on how Trump might treat the tech sector generally, Alex Byers of Politico wrote: “Donald Trump is heading to the White House openly hostile to many of the tech indus-tries’ top priorities in Washington, after a campaign in which he urged a boycott of Apple . . . and traded barbs with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. And that means the tech sector faces a grim change from the privileged status it enjoyed in Washington during the Obama years.” That said, the tech sector may yet find a way in to the administration. Indeed, on December 14 the Trump team met with corporate technology executives—including representatives from Amazon, Google, and Facebook—where Trump struck a concil-iatory tone with companies that have been willfully ignorant of, if not openly hostile to, the interests of creators. The meeting was organized by Peter Thiel, venture capitalist and Facebook board member, who staunchly supported Trump during the campaign and joined his transition team shortly after the election.

Given the lack of alignment between Trump’s stated positions and what many appointees have been saying in their hearings, the copyright and tech-related policies of the Trump administration may depend more on who is appointed to key intel-lectual property positions, including the Directors of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator. Since Trump has focused mostly on Cabinet-level nominees, no one has yet been nominated for these positions. Cabinet-level appointees likely to have an impact on the IP is-sues include the U.S. Trade Representative (nominee Robert Lighthizer), the Secretary of Commerce (nomi-nee Wilbur Ross). The new Register of Copyrights, Dr. Carla Hayden, could also shape the administration’s approach to negotiating the copyright-tech balance. [See pages 13–14.]

Net NeutralityIt is possible that net neutrality (the principle that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally), which is enshrined in FCC regulations recently up-held by a federal appellate court, could be in danger. In a 2014 tweet, Trump called the regulation of Internet traffic “an attack on the Internet” and a “top-down power grab” by the Obama administration. Trump transition team adviser Jeffrey Eisenach underscored


Trump’s deregulatory stance when he recently said on C-SPAN, “Taking his broader views on regulation into account, you would expect him to appoint to the FCC [a chairman] who would be inclined to take less of a regulatory position.” As of press time, no candidates have been announced, but reports have suggested that many at the FCC, as well as Eisenbach, believe the next Chairman will be one of its current Republican com-missioners and will subscribe to a deregulatory ap-proach.

Supreme Court VacancyA Trump appointee to the Court would reshape its composition, of course, but any partisan aspects of his appointment won’t necessarily affect the outcome of copyright cases that may reach the high court, as copy-right is essentially a nonpartisan issue.

Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)This ambitious, multinational free trade deal would offer rightsholders better cross-border protections for their intellectual property across the 12 Pacific Rim nations involved. Trump ran on his opposition to the trade agreement (and all of our trade agree-ments starting with and including NAFTA), and has not yet changed his tune on this, so it’s likely that we will see the U.S. pull out. Trump’s nominee to serve as U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer, has been critical of free trade and would appear likely to support Trump’s avowed opposition to TPP. However, many other Trump appointees, including nominees Wilbur Ross (Secretary of Commerce), Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State), and Gary Cohn (Director of National Economic Council) have publicly advocated for the TPP, so there could be some tension on this is-sue within the incoming administration.

The Affordable Care ActAuthors Guild members have already been in touch with the office with concerns that their insurance un-der the Affordable Care Act would be revoked, ask-ing whether the Guild would be able to offer health insurance again through a third-party provider if the Affordable Care Act is indeed dismantled. The Senate has already taken a first step toward repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with a narrow majority vote in the budget reconciliation process, instructing the applicable House and Senate committees to begin drafting legislation. As of this writing, it appears that Trump and the Republican leadership understand that taking health care away from 20 million Americans

will not fly and they need to enact a replacement, but it is unclear what that replacement will look like. Trump has said that his team has already developed a new health care package to replace the ACA and they are just putting the finishing touches on it. Trump claims that everyone will have insurance under his plan and that people covered under it “can expect to have great health care. It will be in a much-simplified form. Much less expensive and much better.”

The Authors Guild will be keeping a close eye on the legislation as it moves forward. It is unlikely that any of the existing insurance plans under the ACA will be terminated immediately or that any changes will take effect right away.

In the meantime, many authors have reported in recent months that they have had trouble getting or paying for insurance under the ACA, and the Authors Guild has already begun looking into alternative, af-fordable health insurance plans for our members. (The Authors Guild provided health insurance to members until 2010, when our insurance provider discontinued the program due to the high costs under the ACA.) We are hopeful that we will be able to find and provide our members with affordable insurance in the next year whether or not the ACA is dismantled, but we will have to see how the market shakes out.

Trump’s Position on Intellectual PropertyDuring the campaign, Trump said little about where he stands on intellectual property generally, but given that much of his wealth has been accumulated through intellectual property (his brand, identity and TV show), we’d expect him to be sympathetic with right-sholders. Perhaps the closest indication Trump has of-fered as to how he will treat intellectual property as president came during an August 8, 2016, speech out-lining his economic plan, where he disparaged China’s “rampant theft of intellectual property” and under-scored the importance of creative labor to the overall U.S. economy: “Enforcing intellectual property rules alone could save millions of American jobs. According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, improved protection of America’s intellectual property in China would produce more than 2 million jobs right here in the United States. Add to that the jobs that would be saved by cracking down on currency cheating and product dumping, and we would be bringing trillions of dollars in wealth and wages back to the United States.”

This approach was underscored by the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC)



The Writing Life: What Authors Need to Know

If launching a writing career is a daunting business—a test of talent and a leap in the dark—maintaining one is a continual juggling act, for even the most experienced au-thors. The Guild has long provided its members support in the survival realm. As the world of publishing continues to evolve, we will be upping our commitment with an increasing number of pieces on familiar topics and newer ones, for both emerging writ-ers and members of long standing.

In recent months, we have collaborated with our friends at Electric Lit to produce a series of how-to articles demystifying the business side of writing. These pieces cover everything from finding an agent to financial management, tax tips and how to keep your work from landing in the slush pile. All are housed in our online Writers Resource Library, a curated collection available exclusively to Authors Guild members.

In this special section we offer two pieces from the Electric Lit collection, and three others that address issues of importance to all writers. Enjoy.

✦

Going It Alone: Submitting an Un-agented BookBy Tobias Carroll

Writing a book is a challenge for any author, from someone working on his debut novel to a veteran

scribe finishing her 20th book. But while finishing a manuscript represents an accomplishment, there’s an imposing task lurking in the distance: finding some-one to publish it.

While having an agent can help, lacking one isn’t an insurmountable obstacle to publishing. A 2014 pro-file of William T. Vollmann noted that he had no agent for his first seven books. Some writers may prefer to deal directly with publishers, avoiding paying a per-centage on any advances, and having a more direct immersion in the publishing process. My own expe-rience, having two books released by independent presses in 2016, serves as an example that publication without an agent is an attainable goal.

Find the Right PublishersIf you are seeking publication without an agent, it helps to have a few things in mind as you begin the process. There are plenty of resources out there for writers, and using them correctly can be helpful as you make your way toward publication. But just as no two writers are

alike, neither are any two books, and a strategy that works well for one of your peers might prove much less effective for your own work. Above all, your search for a publisher should be geared to the kind of writing you’re doing. If an independent press has an open call for submissions and its focus is horror fiction, it prob-ably won’t be the ideal place for you to submit your memoir of traveling in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Most of the publishers you’ll be researching will be independent presses or presses affiliated with a uni-versity. (Or you might look into an organization like FC2—Fiction Collective Two—which hold two contests annually for which writers can submit manuscripts.) Most big publishing houses will only accept work sub-mitted by agents. There are rare exceptions, but by and large, the route you’ll be taking will be through a host of independent, university and academic presses.

Once you’ve narrowed your search to publishers that would be a good fit for your book, you’ll need to get materials ready to send out. Some publishers will consider proposals for works of nonfiction. The specifics vary from publisher to publisher, but in gen-eral, you’ll want to have at least a sample chapter and a detailed outline ready. If you’re submitting a work of fiction—either a novel or a short story collection—odds are good that you’ll need to have a completed manuscript ready to go. Many independent publish-ers’ websites include information as to whether they take unsolicited manuscripts and, if so, what they’re looking for.


editors will want to see the first 5 pages, others might want the first 10, and still others the first 20 or 25. Have these cuts preformatted so you can easily attach them in an e-mail.

How would you describe your book to persuade some-one to read it? You’ll want to spend some time thinking about this and trying varia-tions on friends until you have refined your pitch into something compelling. This is another situation where you might want to have mul-tiple versions ready: some editors want to see shorter descriptions of around 100 words, while others will be looking for something more detailed, in the range of 250 to 300 words.

similar to yours. Publishers will want to know if there is an audience for your book. If your book is a history of a music scene, be prepared with the titles of several books that have taken a simi-lar approach. If it’s a revision-ist western, have the titles of a few others ready to cite if someone asks.

Be Polite and ProfessionalIf you have a public-facing social media presence, be aware that pub-lishers may look you up there as

well, and act accordingly. If you have a website that features links to works you’ve written, make sure that those links are current and in good shape; an editor who goes there, clicks through and finds a bunch of 404 errors may not be impressed. And if your website doesn’t have links to published works you’re proud of—add them.

As mentioned earlier, researching publishers is important, both to determine the relevance of your book’s subject matter to specific presses and to learn their submission policies. Many independent presses

Get Your Manuscript Ready to SendWhether you’re submitting a manuscript or a proposal, take some time to look it over. Make sure that your for-matting is consistent, that you’ve selected a readable font and that nothing seems out of order. Your goal is to impress who-ever is reading your manuscript; the last thing you want to do is distract this person from the story you’re trying to tell. Mismatched page numbers, fonts that change size from chapter to chapter and ty-pos large or small can all distract a reader from your work, and make him more likely to reject it.

Some writers opt to hire a free-lance editor to work on their manu-script before sending it out. (The Editorial Freelancers Association maintains a directory; some au-thors may offer similar services on their websites.) This can be helpful, especially if you’d like to get an-other set of eyes on your book and some potentially useful feedback. But just as you wouldn’t send your science fiction epic to a press that specializes in fishing memoirs, you should make sure that a freelance editor has worked on books similar to yours and can offer advice that’s useful and constructive.

An editor who is an expert in one genre might not be as qualified to offer advice about something in a completely different field. Make sure to ask about the books any editors you’re considering have worked on previously, what their own areas of interest are and if they can provide any testimonials or ref-erences. The right editor might be able to offer a per-spective on your work that you’d never considered, benefiting it immensely—but finding that person can take a little extra time.

What Else Should You Send?Before reaching out to editors and publishers, there are several materials you’ll want to have ready. Many of the people you’ll want to talk to will ask for some combination of this information before requesting a full manuscript: Continued on page 26

Imag

e b

y Ja

son

Ric

eIf an independent press has

an open call for submissions

and its focus is horror ction,

it probably won’t be the

ideal place for you to submit

your memoir of traveling in

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

—Tobias Carroll


The Art of the PitchBy Chadwick Moore

For emerging writers, the stag-ger toward that first byline is

arduous. Each writer’s style and approach to pitching editors be-come solidified only after years spent firing off into deep space so many desperate, cringe-worthy ramblings. When I left school, it occurred to me I had no idea what an e-mail pitch looked like. A successful one, I’ve come to believe, is a thing of economy and nuance. A few items are important to consider along the way.

The IdeaWhatever your idea, when writ-ing nonfiction—whether per-sonal essay, journalism or book proposal—your pitch must be clear and tight. No cruising down the rabbit hole. For the purpose of your pitch, imag-ine the story whittled down to its bare essence: the basic who, what, when, where and why this deserves publication. If you consider a story to be some-thing that is constructed—as opposed to something discov-ered, intact, waiting there for you all along—what you’re sell-ing is that one steel beam that will eventually support the entire structure. Your job at this point is to show off the simplicity, sturdiness and attractiveness of that beam.

The EditorYou may find yourself in the position of cold-calling an editor you’ve never met. Go for it, but do your homework first. When pitching to book publishers, book agents and editors of magazines, newspapers and journals, know what kind of content has done well for them in the past, and always read between the lines for differences in taste, tone and style; these qual-ities vary not only across publishers, but also among

the different sections of a publication. Pay attention to the core readership. Remember that one idea can be

many different stories, depend-ing on where it is placed. One idea might be equally viable for The New York Times and the New York Post, but those pitches prob-ably will differ.

If you’re pitching to a large publication, say The New York Times, avoid reaching out to one of the head honchos, such as a section editor (unless you have a personal relationship). Go for someone a notch lower in that section, such as a deputy edi-tor. You’ll be more likely to hear back.

As editor-at-large for a na-tional magazine, I’m shocked on a daily basis by how few press agents and writers put effort into targeting their pitches specifi-cally for me. If you haven’t both-ered to do your homework (and it seems almost no one in PR does anymore), prepare to be ignored. One particularly boneheaded incident stands out among hun-dreds for me. Two days following the massacre in Orlando, with the gay community still deeply grieving, a press rep blasted off an e-mail to me about an excit-ing new luxury handbag she felt my readers—gay men—would be very interested in learning about. This happens all the time,

despite the fact that I have zero interest in fashion and have never covered anything fashion-related. In this instance, had the press rep simply Googled me, she would also have seen I was on the ground in Orlando filing stories all week.

In that case, I did write back. “Hi Helen, Greetings from Orlando. So sorry I won’t be able to write about your handbag. Very busy sorting through the bodies of all these murdered gay people.”

Even if your pitch gets rejected, if it at least resem-bles an idea that an editor would normally run, and you’ve shown a clear interest in the work that editor is doing, your pitch will stand out.

Most important, don’t be intimidated. Editors need you just as much as you need them. They rely on your ideas, even the bad ones.

Imag

e b

y M

icha

el H

oew

eler

The most important part of the pitch

e-mail is brevity. Keep it smart and

keep it ef cient.

—Chadwick Moore


The E-mailThe most important part of the pitch e-mail is brevity. Keep it smart and keep it efficient. No one cares about your study abroad in France, about your GPA, about who inspires you or that you were features editor of your college paper.

At the top, briefly introduce yourself and your ex-perience and then get to the meat: What’s the story? Be as specific as possible here. An editor doesn’t want to think about where a story should be placed. Tell the editor where it belongs. “This would be great for 500 words in the Observatory column in the Tuesday Science section.” If you have published clips, or even unpublished ones, link to your three best. Don’t send files as attachments.

The subject line of your e-mail need be noth-ing more than “Ideas” or “Article proposal,” though feel free to add a couple words if necessary. “Idea: Mockingbird terrorizing hipsters in Brooklyn,” is the typical tone of a subject line I would send to the Times. That story got an immediate green light.

It helps to offer up a few sacrificial lambs. If you’re trying to get your foot in the door and you’ve got one great idea for a publication, come up with four oth-ers before you reach out. List the ideas, “Idea 1, Idea 2,” each with an informed and efficient description. If

some of these ideas aren’t so great, that only makes the better ideas appear more attractive by comparison.

The SilenceYou will get ignored, always. While in limbo, don’t let yourself become discouraged and don’t take the si-lence personally.

I usually follow up after three days with a simple and polite message along the lines of, “Hello again, just curious if you received these ideas.” After that, maybe follow up in another week, and if still no re-sponse, perhaps move on.

While waiting, it’s important to avoid pitching the same idea to multiple publications simultaneously. If two publications green-light the same idea, you’ll be left in the embarrassing, and quite unprofessional, position of dumping one editor for the sake of the other—and that’s not going to bode well for your fu-ture dealings.

The RejectionIn the case of pitching, no news is bad news. But don’t completely write that editor off. It’s perfectly fine to come back with more ideas. If anything, your persis-tence may get you noticed and may even result in a small assignment coming your way. But remember to maintain decorum: no stalking.

I’ve always felt a “thanks, but no thanks” response is second best to getting a project green-lit. If an editor takes the time to respond to you, he or she may see po-tential. You should absolutely pitch that person again, and the sooner the better. In this situation, never be afraid to respond, point-blank, “What kind of stories do you like? What’s on your radar right now?”

The Green LightIt may happen that an editor takes your baby, tarts it up and throws it back at you in the form of a hideous and unrecognizable stepchild. This is fine. This is no time to be a diva. It is imperative to show you are easy to work with and you can get the job done. And now this editor, I guarantee you, does not want to hear from you again until your message contains a pristine first draft. Stay out of the editor’s hair, file the story on time and stick to your word count. And once that project is down, don’t waste any time moving on to the next pitch. ✦

Chadwick Moore is editor-at-large for Out and The Advocate, and contributor to Playboy and The New York Times. He formerly worked in book publishing in London and New York. He lives in Brooklyn.

The Authors Guild Foundation Legal Defense Fund

The Authors Guild has fought on a number of fronts to protect authors’ rights on behalf of the entire creative community. We’ve fought in the courtroom when necessary, but we’ve also stood up against Amazon’s industry dominance and publishers’ unfair contracts in the press, in the corridors of government, and in publishers’ boardrooms.

To continue our advocacy efforts without sac-rificing member support and daily operations, the Authors Guild Foundation created the Authors Guild Foundation Legal Defense Fund to sup-port the Authors Guild’s key advocacy initiatives. With the help of your tax-deductible contribu-tion, we will continue the fight to ensure a com-petitive publishing industry for decades to come, and to ensure that strong copyright protection and creators’ rights continue to have an advocate in our legal system.

Donate at www.authorsguild.org/donate/.


The Short, Sad Life of an Unsuccessful NovelistBy Margaret Verble

I noticed my first symptom in 1999. A tingling in my finger-

tips. An odd feeling, like they were trying to grasp what they couldn’t reach or, maybe, try-ing to run away. Definitely do-ing something they shouldn’t be doing. I, however, was doing exactly what I thought I should be doing: running a consulting business, playing tennis, vaca-tioning in places that suited my self-image. Still, the tingling persisted. There was something wrong with me.

When I wasn’t on the road working, I began hibernat-ing. My basement den is nice. Equipped with a computer, ex-ercise equipment and TV. The exercise equipment and TV didn’t alleviate the tingling. The computer keys, though, had a soothing effect. That’s what those fingers had been wanting to do. Tap, tap, tap, and so on.

And on. I spent every spare moment I had from 1999 through 2007 in my basement den at that computer. That’s nine full years. I decided early on that I could run a business and write fiction. But I didn’t have time to run a business, write fiction and talk about writing fiction. The only person I discussed my writing with was my husband. He was also a consultant; but, when we’d fallen in love, he’d been the poet in resi-dence for the metro Nashville school system. David had once had a fine mind for literature. I’d had a fairly good one. But, you see, we’d chosen, instead, to earn a living.

By 2007, I’d produced a couple of novels. And had tried to get agents for them. But I had no success at that. I began having other symptoms. A sinking feel-ing. A tenderness. Maybe a perpetual pout. I decided I couldn’t get a novel published alone. I needed help. I used the handy computer and looked on the Internet.

To my surprise, there were writers’ workshops out there. Evidently, other people knew this. It was an in-dustry. But, you see, I’d been in the basement, attend-

ing to the reading, writing and imagining it takes to produce novels.

I picked my first workshop on the basis of dubious criteria: (1) it had to be near New York, as even down in a basement in Kentucky it had come to me that the action is up there in the City; (2) it had to be near enough to drive to, as I fly too much for a living; (3) it had to offer critique sessions, because I had to know if I’d been wasting my time; (4) it needed nonfiction offerings, so I could entice my college room-mate to go with me.

We picked the Wesleyan Writers Conference, and I was assigned Roxana Robinson as my instructor. I read a couple of Roxana’s books, as I wanted to be sure she could write. (She sure can.) I took the books with me, as you can’t expect anyone to take an interest in you if you don’t take an interest in her. Roxana critiqued my manu-script. After I left our session, I read what she’d inscribed on the title page of her novel Sweetwater : “For Margaret , Already a good writer.” That’s what nine years in a basement will do for you. You have to write to be a writer. And write. And write. And so on.

You also need a mentor, be-cause nobody, I mean nobody,

is successful alone. Roxana was kind enough to try to find me an agent. But agents are running businesses and have agendas of their own. None of the ones we tried wanted to take me on. I was discouraged. Kept writing. By then, not really by choice. By addiction. In July 2008, I wrote in a journal, “I thought I’d found an agent for my fiction. But I’ve just opened a letter that says I’m wrong about that. Likes the writing. Doesn’t know where to sell it. He’s not the first. I’ve failed at this so much that disappointment feels like destiny calling. Hard work isn’t enough. I need that conflu-ence of forces called Luck.”

Pho

to b

y Le

e Th

omas

“When luck comes knocking,

you have to answer immediately,

no matter what you’re doing,

no matter how many

pain meds you’re on.”

—Margaret Verble


In October 2009, I wrote, “If I were inclined toward discouragement, that rock would be rolling me down a hill. Every morning I’m home, seven days a week, I get up early and write for an hour and a half. Then, after supper, I write nearly every night. I still haven’t found an agent. I may have lost sight of the line be-tween perseverance and futility.”

In February 2010, Roxana came to Lexington for a book appearance. On that trip, she suggested I try writing short stories to build some credentials. I’m a novelist at heart; I didn’t want to do that. And I was busy. I had a contract with the National Health Service in the UK, and a new British partner who was going through treatment for cancer. I was also exhausted and frightened. I didn’t take up Roxana’s advice until the next year.

In January 2011, I wrote my first short story, “The Teller,” and sent it off to the Arkansas Review. I didn’t hear anything for months. I finally followed up with the editor, Janelle Collins. She told me the story was in the “maybe” pile. But on August 13, she e-mailed me to say she’d accepted it. The news gave me validation and hope. It justified all those years down the stairs.

I got a few more short stories published after that. But I still didn’t have an agent. And I still hadn’t given up being a novelist. By fall 2013, I’d finished a new novel, Maud’s Allotment; but by then, I knew I had can-cer. Informed by the pathology report after surgery for something else. My cancer surgery had to be delayed until I’d healed enough to be cut open again. I went on to Scotland to work because I had a commitment there, and because, when you’re in business, if you’re not actually dead, you have to show up. While I was in Edinburgh, I had a bad meal alone, and a short story rejected by e-mail. You get the picture here: cancer, rejection, bad food, and half an island away from my partner. I e-mailed Roxana. Mentioned only the bad food, rejection and novel. She e-mailed me back. Said her agent was taking new clients. To send her, Lynn Nesbit, a hard copy.

When I got back to the States, I had two days before surgery, but I mailed that manuscript off. When Lynn sent a request for an electronic copy, I was somewhere in the bowels of the University of Kentucky Medical Center, too ill to sit up. My best friend brought my computer to me, moved me up in the bed and helped me hit the right keys. When Luck comes knocking, you have to answer immediately, no matter what you’re doing, no matter how many pain meds you’re on.

I was two days out of the hospital, still heavily doped, and sitting next to a bag of urine hooked over a drawer when Lynn called. She said she thought my book was “about 85 percent there,” and before she

tried to sell it, she wanted me to send it to an editor she would pick. I tried to sound coherent, and Lynn said she’d call back with a name. When we hung up, I looked at the bag of pee. Wondered if I’d understood. Wondered if I’d hallucinated. Decided to wait and see. Cancer puts things in perspective.

But the sailing has been smooth seas from there. The editor, Adrienne Brodeur, had good judgment and was helpful. I slowly regained my health. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt bought the book, and Lauren Wein, my editor there, has been lovely to work with. Maud’s Line (the title was changed in New York) has a Pulitzer finalist badge on the paperback cover, and is selling. I have a new manuscript with Lynn right now.

Fifteen years isn’t really a long time to learn a complicated task like novel writing. It really isn’t. It’s not painting by numbers. That unsuccessful novelist is dead and buried. For now. I am alive and healthy. Again, for now. My fingers still tingle. But I’ve gotten used to that. ✦

Margaret Verble’s debut novel, Maud’s Line, was a Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She lives in Lexington, KY.

Who Pays Writers What?

In 2012, when Manjula Martin came up with the idea of a website that would list what various magazines and websites were paying writers, most freelancers—and many in-house writers—were in the dark as to what to expect, or dare ask for. Their only hope was a tip from a fellow writer, the sort of exchange that can be uncom-fortable for both sides. Martin’s crowd-sourced WhoPaysWriters.com (see article opposite) cracked open the door. Since then dozens of sites listing payments at outlets big and small have proliferated on the web, some of them offering ”premium” listings for a price as well, others that focus on specific genres. For writers just starting out, they can be useful, but be careful where you click. Here’s a sampling—visited by us but not endorsed.

whopayswriters.comcontently.net/rates-databasewritejobs.infowww.makealivingwriting.comthereviewreview.net/publishing-tips/show-me-literary-magazines-pay


Talking $$$$$: Writers Break the Last Taboo

Five years ago, Manjula Martin dreamed up the web-site WhoPaysWriters.com, a crowd-sourced site for

writers to exchange notes on what different publica-tions, print and electronic, pay free-lancers. Four years ago, with the writer and publishing consultant Jane Friedman, she launched the online magazine Scratch, as a forum for writers to talk frankly about the tradeoffs between making art and making a living. “It’s still really scary and sometimes dangerous to talk about how much money you make,” she told The New York Times in 2014 “and so we’re trying to bring a little honesty to that.”

In essays and conversations, Scratch contributors and inter-view subjects shared strategy, tradeoffs, tax advice, compro-mises, agent names, publishers, and real numbers, as in advances (Jonathan Franzen), credit card debt (Cheryl Strayed), student loan debt (Roxane Gay). Scratch the magazine shut down in July 2015, but WhoPaysWriters.com lives on, and a collection of essays and interviews from the magazine—Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, edited by Manjula Martin—is just out from Simon & Schuster. An excerpt:

I began as a “stock girl” at eleven years old. My job was to run up and down the stairs to the base-

ment of my grandmother’s upscale housewares store and fetch customer purchase—sets of wine glasses and unassembled wire drawer units, mostly. Every summer weekend of 1987 I carried outgoing boxes up the stairs and newly arrived boxes down. Between laps, I flattened and bundled cardboard, tallied inventory on a clipboard and filed purchase orders. I worked hard, but nepotism had its privileges: was paid $5 and hour in cash under the table, a fortune for a kid and on par

with what the grown-up clerks made. (California min-imum wage at the time was $3.35)

In high school, I scored a legit job at the local used book and record store. There, I still had to flatten card-board but I also shelved pocket books—sci-fi, mys-teries, and Westerns—in their delineated sections on the basement level of the store. I got my hand on the work of Flannery O’Connor, Emily Dickinson, Joan

Didion, and Anaïs Nin, and the fan-tasy of leaving behind my day job grew. I could see so many potential iterations of myself as a success-ful writer: I might be the sensitive introvert composing my work in a window eat while watching the light fall all day long; the cultural critic, always traveling and observ-ing, a notebook and chic sunglasses my most constant companions; or the continental sensation breaking literary hearts with every breath-less epistolary I penned. Regardless of the details, I was certain I would soon be illuminating the human condition with impeccable prose while living a life far removed from the drudgery of “regular” work.

I was sixteen and about to grad-uate from high school by the time a coworker said to me, “So, what are you gonna to do now?” I’d soon be leaving to attend college back east, but I already had larger ambitions. (And had recently added Kerouac to my roster of role models.)

“I dunno,” I said, “maybe drop-out of college and move to New York and become a famous writer by the age of twenty-one?”

My coworker, a bookseller with two kids, a man who has read and understood all of Proust, Finnegan’s Wake and John Fahey’s liner notes—and an agreeable clerk who was kind and sincere to even the most hostile of customers—rolled his eyes. He handed me a stack of pa-perbacks and said, “Yeah. Right.

Don’t quit your day job, kid.”Did I really believe I would be a best-selling author

with a sweet SoHo loft by age twenty-one? No, but I didn’t believe I wouldn’t be. Any artist who produces work for public consumption must navigate a tenuous

Pho

to b

y Te

d W

eins

tein

“So, what are you

gonna do now?”

“I dunno . . . maybe

drop out of college and

move to New York and

become a famous writer

by the age of 21?”

—Manjula Martin


Recently, I was living the Writing Life by clicking on a link to “10 Writing Rules from Some Canonical Author Dude” on one of the literary websites I frequent when I came across an item about a newly discovered letter by Oscar Wilde. Among a reported thirteen pages of advice to a younger writer was Wilde’s ad-monition to secure a steady income: “The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread.”

In other words, don’t quit your day job, kid. ✦

From SCRATCH: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living by Manjula Martin. Copyright © 2017 by Manjula Martin. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

balance of ambition and pragmatism. Ambition re-quires dreaming; sometimes dreams veer into fantasy. Fantasies, once they take root, are difficult to remove. Weedlike, they devour the productive environment around them. They are fertile and robust. Sometimes, they even flower.

The Writing Life is one such fantasy; another is quit-ting your day job. Both scenarios imply there is some-thing else—something more—for artists around the bend. Freedom, unfettered expression, fame. Legend, even. Take my high school-era hero: Emily Dickinson, hard at work at her little table, free from the bothers of having to earn a living (and an unseen maid hard at work cleaning up after her, no doubt.) I know it’s not real for me, but also, even now I believe in it a little.

list their policies on their websites. Keep track of these and be respectful of them: if a publisher says that it doesn’t accept unagented submissions, your sending a host of messages to its main e-mail address isn’t going to change anyone’s mind. If a publisher does accept unagented submissions but doesn’t provide sufficient detail on its site, e-mail the contact address with a brief description of your project and ask what materials you should submit for consideration. Some publish-ers might request a full manuscript; others might want to see an excerpt. As stated earlier, the procedure will vary from publisher to publisher.

Again, be polite. Being told that your manuscript has been rejected or that a publisher’s submission win-dow is now closed is understandably bad news. No one likes rejection. But taking it out on someone work-ing at the press is not going to convince that person to make an exception for you.

Keep Track of OpportunitiesSome publishers have finite reading periods for manu-scripts. Some will mention this on their websites; oth-ers may announce it on social media or via an e-mail newsletter. Keep track of these dates. If a reading pe-riod is several months away, set a reminder in your calendar. Open reading periods can lead to publica-tion, as can contests, which often focus on a specific type of manuscript. These are great ways to have your

work looked at by presses; additionally, journals like Entropy (which has a recurring Where to Submit fea-ture) frequently compile lists of open reading periods and contests that can result in publication.

You should also keep a record of where you’ve sub-mitted manuscripts or queries. Spreadsheets can be very useful in this endeavor; you’ll want to note such facts as the name of the press, the date you submit-ted work and (if applicable) what you sent that press. If the publisher uses an application like Submittable to handle submissions, you’ll have some of this data available when you log in, but it’s best to keep track of everything separately as well. And if your book does get accepted by a publisher while it’s under review from another publisher, it’s good form to let the sec-ond publisher know so that no one there spends time reviewing a manuscript that’s already been taken by another press.

Good Luck!Finding a publisher without an agent can be a formi-dable challenge—but then, so is writing a book in the first place. Having an idea of what resources are avail-able and a sense of the best practices to employ while you are doing your research can make a difficult proj-ect a lot easier. And it’s always possible that someone you encounter during the process will be interested in a future project of yours. The route to publication is a complicated one, but it can lead to a host of rewards. ✦

Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of the liter-ary website Vol. 1 Brooklyn and the author of the books Reel (Rare Bird) and Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms). Courtesy Electric Lit.

Going It Alone



Financial Management for Freelance WritersBy the Electric Literature staff

Working from home might seem like “living the dream,” but being a full-time freelance writer can

be a nightmare if you don’t know how to manage your time and money. Reading your favorite writers doesn’t teach you how to do taxes, and nobody talks about word rates in writing classes, so many writers quickly feel lost and overwhelmed when it comes to managing their finances. Here’s a quick guide to staying alive in the world of writing-for-hire.

Salaried vs. Contracted WorkDoing taxes as a freelancer can be a lot more compli-cated than doing them when you have a regular full-time job with a W-2. If you’ve ever had a salaried job, you know that the first paycheck is always less than you expect, because most taxes are taken out when you’re paid. For contracted services, which includes freelance work, you’re responsible for paying taxes on your income after you’re paid. This can mean more money up front, but a larger tax burden at the end of the year (or quarter if you pay quarterly).

Every time you’re paid for freelance work by a new client, you’ll be asked to fill out a W-9 form. W-9 forms provide the client—in this case, the publisher—with necessary information like your address, Social Security number, and legal name. Every client that pays you more than $600 in a single calendar year is required to provide you with a 1099 form, which re-ports the total compensation the client paid you for the year. Come tax time, you are responsible for reporting these earnings to the IRS and the state, not your client. Starting in tax year 2017, 1099s must be provided to freelancers (you) by January 31. But not all publishers are as informed and organized as you’ll be after read-ing this article, so if you earned more than $600 from anyone for freelance work and haven’t received a 1099 by February, be sure to follow up.

If you’re subsisting on freelance income exclusively you should consider paying your taxes on a quarterly basis, rather than annually. It will help you keep track of your expenses and income better, and, of course, it helps prevent that awkward situation not a few au-thors have found themselves in at tax time when they do not have the cash on hand to pay all the taxes due for the year. Hiring a freelance tax advisor to help you with this is usually worth the fee and certainly worth it for your peace of mind. There are some big firms—

like H&R Block—which do free consultations, but there are also many private accountants who are used to dealing with “creatives” and have expertise in ap-plying the tax rules to freelancers. Whatever you do, it’s best to remember that asking for help upfront is al-ways cheaper than dealing with the IRS when it comes knocking.

Tax Write-OffsWhether you’re self-employed or subsisting largely on freelance income, you should plan to “write off” business-related expenses on your taxes. To be eligi-ble to deduct writing-related expenses, you must in-tend to write professionally and for your writing to be income-generating. If the IRS deems your writing a hobby, they will not allow the deductions. You can deduct expenses even if you had a bad year income-wise (e.g., an advance that arrived in full in the prior calendar year), and the IRS will allow it, as long as you can show writing income for past or subsequent years. If your writing is income-generating, or you honestly expect it to be in the next year or so, then you should start keeping track of the kinds of writing-related ex-penses you can write off.

Write-offs, or deductions, can include large ex-penses, such as a computer, and smaller ones, such as office supplies or lunch with an editor. If you write about film, television, or books, purchases of those kinds of media—even subscriptions to streaming sites like Netflix, digital magazines, or databases—can be considered work-related expenses. If you work from home, you can even write off a portion of your rent or, if you own your home, a portion of your mortgage interest and real estate taxes. This can be a little tricky, but the best method is to calculate what percentage of your rent or mortgage interest and taxes goes toward your home office, based on square footage. If you don’t have a separate space for your office, you can still take a portion of your home as your workspace, but be ju-dicious.

When applying all of these deductions to your tax return, err on the side of caution, and, if possible, hire

If you’re subsisting on freelance income

exclusively you should consider

paying your taxes on a quarterly basis,

rather than annually.


cause it’s more expensive for the publication, but if you are offered an hourly rate, bravo! You’re in good shape. All you have to do is decide if that hourly rate seems fair, based on the type of work you’re doing—and keep in mind you can always try to negotiate the rate. However, most of the time you’ll be offered a flat rate or word rate for the piece. So, if an article for a

website takes you one hour to complete and you’re being offered 50 bucks for said article, that’s great: you’ve made 50 bucks an hour. However, if that article takes you several days to complete, you have to con-sider how much you’re really making. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t do cool pieces for peanuts—there will be times when the exposure of a low-paid or unpaid piece is likely to lead to paid work, and building your résumé sometimes requires doing work that doesn’t pay very well. But while you can cobble together an income with little pieces here and there, you should always be honest with yourself about how much each gig is actually worth.

Treat Your “Survival Job” with RespectMost freelance writers today cannot live entirely on their writing. Gone are the days when a writer could make thousands from one or two magazine articles. In that same vein, resist the temptation to idealize estab-lished writers’ full-time jobs at big magazines where they seemingly get to write about whatever they want. Instead of looking too far ahead, it’s important to think about what part-time jobs you can do to remain finan-cially stable.

Whether you are waiting tables, dog-walking, working retail, or doing any other job that is just crush-ing your creative soul, here’s a hard truth: being a writer is a long game and you’ve got to take care of yourself. Having that extra thousand dollars in the bank may be better than cranking out a few more freelance pieces when you get to the end of the month. Your day job may be the only thing between you and being broke.

a professional. Some rules can be quite complicated, so if you are proceeding without professional help make sure to study them thoroughly. The rent deduction, for example, is an estimate, which means it should be con-servative. While claiming your expenses as deductions is completely legitimate and essential—you are run-ning your own business—claiming suspiciously high amounts can trigger an audit.

In order to keep track of work-related expenses throughout the year, you’ll need to save your receipts. Many freelancers choose to write notes on their receipts to remember what the expense was for: e.g. “Lunch with Bunny to discuss revisions.” But this system can get messy fast and lead to drawers bursting with un-organized bits of white paper. Now, there are a variety of receipt management apps that can help with track-ing your expenses. These apps allow you to take a picture of the receipt, label it, and save it within the app—freeing up that drawer for your working manu-scripts. And while it’s a good idea to save all your re-ceipts, another way to further delineate your personal and business expenses is simply to use a dedicated bank account or credit card to make all your writing- related purchases. That way, if there’s no receipt, there’s still a record of the transaction with your bank. A lot of apps and software—including basic Quickbooks—will allow you to import a PDF of your bank or credit card statement. From there, different types of expenses can more easily and readily be separated.

Additionally, when it comes to taxes, it’s worth noting that freelancers pay taxes that salaried employ-ees don’t. This is because if you work for an employer, you and your employer each pay half of your Social Security and Medicare taxes. If you’re self-employed, on the other hand, you pay the combined employee and employer amount.

Hourly vs. Flat or Word RateBe sure to set hourly, flat, and word rates for yourself that are realistic and will enable you to meet your fi-nancial goals. Usually, the publication will set the rate (there may or may not be room for negotiation), but it is useful to have an expected rate in mind so that you think twice about taking work that pays less than your desired rate. You can always take on lower-pay-ing work, as long as you also have higher-paying work that will allow you to pay your bills, or if the piece is likely to bring you more work or prestige. But don’t jump at work just because someone is offering to pub-lish you. Remember that your work is valuable and it is your business; so don’t give it away unless there is a clear business reason to do so.

Most freelance writers aren’t paid by the hour be-

Freelancers pay taxes that salaried employees

don’t. . . . if you work for an employer, you

and your employer each pay half of your

Social Security and Medicare taxes. If you’re

self-employed . . . you pay both.


in its December 2016 strategic plan for IP enforcement in the coming years. The IPEC report noted that coun-terfeiting and piracy worldwide “appears to be ap-proaching, if not surpassing, the trillion dollar mark.” It also singled out China as a nation of rampant in-fringement, stating that China and Hong Kong are the origin of 87% of all goods seized by U.S. Customs and Border protection.

Stay tuned. . .It is difficult to assess how the Trump administration will treat copyright and the rights of authors. Given the lack of substantive discussion on these issues dur-ing the campaign and Trump’s willingness to change his views (or at least what he says) on certain issues, we’re left to speculate. The Guild will keep you, our members and supporters, posted on the positions and priorities of the Trump administration as they come to light. Be sure to consult our bi-weekly newsletter and e-mail alerts on these issues if you would like to stay informed. ✦

Invoicing, Budgeting, and Getting PaidFreelancers know that their income arrives in fits and bursts. Though your income will probably never be as regular as a biweekly paycheck, there are some things you can do to stay organized and plan ahead.

The first step to getting paid for freelance work is to invoice the publisher immediately upon comple-tion of our work. Include the term of payment in your invoice. Unless otherwise stipulated in your contract, the standard term for payment is 30 days. If you ask for a quicker turnaround you may be pressing your luck, but you should feel free to send a reminder to the publication if you haven’t been paid in the agreed upon amount of time. There are many apps and on-line tools for keeping track of your invoicing, includ-ing Freshbooks and Quickbooks, which automatically assign invoice numbers and organize your invoices chronologically, and in one place. If you don’t use a third-party invoicing system, maintain a spread-sheet to track your outstanding payments. Record the amount you are owed in the sheet, along with the pub-lication, invoice date, and invoice number. Whether you are using a spreadsheet or accounting software, it’s essential to record payments as received when they arrive.

When getting paid by a publisher, always sign up for direct deposit if given the option. This way, you can deal directly with an accounts payable department, and avoid lost checks and third-party fees. Once you get direct deposit set-up, subsequent payments will be prompt and automatic. This is a bit more work on the front end, but in the long run it will speed up the pro-cess and make your life much easier.

If direct deposit or third-party payment systems like PayPal are unavailable, you will be paid by check. For the purposes of your own budget, be a pessimist. No matter how much you are paid and no matter how professional the magazine, you’ll likely have to wait much longer than anticipated to actually get your check. It isn’t fair, but it’s better to factor in a late pay-ment than to be burned by one. If certain publishers pay quickly, keep that in mind for future pitches. Even if you don’t love the stuff you write for them, it’s im-portant to have consistent work with publishers who pay reliably.

When the check finally arrives, deposit it immedi-ately. This may seem obvious, but stacks of junk mail have a way of swallowing uncashed checks and bills alike. The fastest way to deposit a check is to use your bank’s mobile app. This allows you to deposit your check from the comfort of your own home by tak-ing photographs of your check within the app. After you’ve deposited the check, write “Mobile Deposit”

and the date across the front of the check. Once you get the e-mail confirmation that your deposit has been processed, you can rip up the check and throw it away; there is no need to save it.

Lessen Your StressWriters are, by nature, creative people who are not necessarily inclined to put extra energy into things like accounting and financial management. However, properly managing your freelance finances is an es-sential part of taking yourself seriously as a writer. Writing is not a hobby, it’s your career, and it’s impor-tant to hold it to the same standards you would any job.

Everything about being a freelancer can create anxiety, including financial management. But the more organized you are, the less anxious you’ll be—freeing up energy to worry about more important things, like writing. ✦

Watch for more financial tips to come in the Spring/Summer issue.

The Trump Presidency



extremely liberally, so that services that allow rampant piracy still comply, and on the other hand, interpreted the rules for rightsholders very strictly.

This has resulted in a statute that has completely failed in one of its two goals—to keep piracy off the legal Internet—but has been extremely successful in its other goal, to allow Internet businesses to flourish. As the author Jonathan Taplin wrote in a December 13 op-ed in The New York Times, “Google and Facebook can achieve huge net profit margins because they dominate the content made available on the web while making very little of it themselves. . . . The rise of these digital giants is directly connected to the fall of the creative industries of our country.” Since 2000, Taplin noted, even as people have been consuming more video, news, and books than ever, recorded music rev-enue has fallen over $12 billion, home video revenue has fallen over $6 billion, and newspaper ad revenue has fallen over $40 billion. “During this same period,” Taplin added, “Google’s revenue grew to $74.5 bil-lion from $400 million.” Imbalanced application of the DMCA by the courts have played a major role in this transfer of wealth.

Now back to our case. In late 2014, BMG Rights Management, a music publisher and rights manage-ment organization, sued Cox—a “conduit” service provider that connects customers to the Internet—for secondary liability stemming from the copyright in-

Hope for Authors in the Digital Piracy Battle

As the Copyright Office continues its study of the effectiveness of the Digital Millennium Copyright

Act (see “Tales of the DMCA,” Authors Guild Bulletin, Summer 2016), an ongoing legal proceeding, BMG Rights Management v. Cox Communications, has offered some potential hope to authors and content creators that Internet service providers (ISPs) acting in bad faith are not immune to the law.

The fact that the Internet serves as a global meet-ing place, bulletin board and speaker system for the public—and sometimes a black market—also makes it the premier venue for copyright infringement. Until recently, however, the DMCA, which Congress created to address digital piracy, has been interpreted largely in favor of ISPs, much to the frustration of copyright holders.

The August 2016 decision in BMG v. Cox by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia that upheld a December 2015 jury finding that awarded the rightsholders $25 million in damages marks a departure from this trend. The decision is sig-nificant for the court’s application of one of the act’s safe harbor protections, and for its finding of “willful contributory infringement” on the part of Cox Com-munications, one of the largest ISPs in the country.

First, a quick refresher on the DMCA. Congress passed the law in 1998, in the hope of addressing digi-tal piracy in the rapidly changing spheres of technol-ogy, communications, and copyright. Included in the new law were certain limitations on liability, or safe harbors, intended to balance technological growth and innovation with the need for authors and other con-tent creators to protect their works.

The DMCA was intended to guard against the potential for rampant piracy on the Internet, given the ease of distributing perfect copies, as well as the concern that ISPs—those services that allow others to transmit, post or display materials on the internet—could potentially be held liable for the infringing ac-tivities of their users. As part of the DMCA, Section 512 of the Copyright Act was enacted as a solution to both; it was meant to incentivize ISPs to keep both in-fringing content and repeat infringers off their services in exchange for immunity from legal liability. To date, courts in many jurisdictions (including the 2nd and 9th Circuits, where most copyright cases are heard) have, on the one hand, interpreted the rules for ISPs

L E G A L W A T C H

Legal Services ScorecarFrom August 15, 2016 through December 31, 2016, the Authors Guild Legal Services Department handled 342 legal inquiries. Included were: 72 book contract reviews 18 agency contract reviews 16 reversion of rights inquiries 49 inquiries on copyright law, including

infringement, registration, duration and fair use

15 inquiries regarding securing permissions and privacy releases

2 electronic rights inquiries 170 other inquiries, including literary estates,

contract disputes, periodical and multi-media contracts, movie and television op-tions, Internet piracy, liability insurance, finding an agent and attorney referrals


fringements of Cox’s customers. Cox is not a website, and does not host any of the content at issue in the case, nor does it store any of the infringing material on its servers. Cox customers, however, use its ser-vices to access the peer-to-peer file sharing network BitTorrent in order to upload and download materials, among many other things. While BitTorrent is capable of non-infringing uses such as uploading materials in the public domain, an estimated 96 percent of its users were seeking infringing content during the time frame at issue in the case.

One of the rules for service providers to avoid li-ability under Section 512 is that a provider must (1) adopt and reasonably implement “a policy that pro-vides for the termination in appropriate circumstances

of subscribers and account holders . . . who are repeat infringers,” and (2) inform its subscribers and account holders of its policy. Cox argued that it had met this standard, but the court disagreed. Although Cox had implemented a policy to deal with notices of copyright infringement by its users, it was essentially a “thir-teen strikes and you’re out” policy, the court noted. Additionally, Cox would attribute only one notice to any given subscriber per day and would process no more than 200 notices per copyright holder per day, re-gardless of how many infringements occurred during the 24-hour period. Furthermore, it was Cox’s practice to retain these notices for just six months, rebooting the strike count after that time. The Court found that Cox had not held up its end of the bargain sufficiently to enjoy the protections of the DMCA safe harbors. Although the company had a repeat infringer policy, the Court found that the policy was not robust enough.

The DMCA was intended to guard against

the potential for rampant piracy on the

Internet . . . as well as the concern that

ISPs . . . could potentially be held liable

for the infringing activities of their users.

The Court also held that Cox was liable for the in-fringements of its users, and at a subsequent trial, the jury found Cox liable for “willful contributory infringe-ment” and awarded BMG $25 million in damages. Under the willful contributory infringement theory, Cox’s liability stems from “evidence of its knowledge of specific infringing activity and continued mate-rial contribution to that infringement.” Cox’s actions were judged contributory to the infringement because it received notices of infringement and ignored them, failing to act even though it could terminate a user’s access by pressing a button. Cox’s actions were found to be willful because the company was consciously blind to the infringement of BMG’s copyrights. That is, while Cox’s customers were using BitTorrent to upload and download BMG’s copyrighted works, Cox turned a blind eye to multiple infringement notices, and in-adequately disposed of those that it chose to address.

Cox has appealed the decision to the Fourth Circuit, but the debate over safe harbor and fair treatment of the various interests the policy is intended to protect continues. Given the wide-ranging effects any decision is expected to have, other organizations are hoping to shape the final outcome, as a variety of groups submit-ted friend-of-the-court briefs to the Fourth Circuit in November.

Finally, the Copyright Office itself may take the BMG v. Cox decision into account in its ongoing review of the DMCA. The Office was flooded with written submissions in the first round of public comments in April 2016. Those written submissions were followed by public roundtables held in New York and San Francisco last May, as we reported in the Summer 2016 Bulletin. Next up, the Office is calling for additional written comments to be filed on February 6. The Guild is putting the finishing touches on these as we go to press.

Finding the balance between the rights of copy-right holders and service providers remains a struggle, as the Copyright Office’s study attests. In the context of the Internet, going after individual infringers is like bailing out the proverbial sinking ship with a spoon. But if service providers are required to actually hold up their end of the bargain by respecting copyrights and not turning a blind eye to obvious infringements, equity may yet be achievable.

— Allison Venuti Legal Intern


Why We Came to the City by Kristopher Jansma and The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle were included in the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize Fiction long list.

The Chicago Public Library Foundation and the Chicago Public Library honored Erik Larson and Scott Turow with Carl Sandburg Literary Awards—for Nonfiction and Fiction, respectively—at the Sandburg Literary Awards Dinner on October 26. The award recognizes “outstanding contributions to the literary world and honors a significant work or body of work that has enhanced the public’s awareness of the writ-ten word.”

The long lists for the 2017 Carnegie Medals for Excellence were announced on September 21. The Fiction category included Rabih Alameddine’s The Angel of History, Dave Eggers’s Heroes of the Frontier, Louise Erdrich’s LaRose, Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, Dominic Smith’s The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton and Larry Watson’s As Good as Gone. Patricia Bell-Scott’s The Firebrand and the First Lady, David France’s How to Survive a Plague, Robert Kanigel’s Eyes on the Street and Mary Roach’s Grunt were listed for Nonfiction. The short lists were announced on October 26. Patricia Bell-Scott’s The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice, was named a final-ist. The winners will be announced January 22, 2017, at RUSA’s Book and Media Awards Ceremony at the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting in Atlanta.

Kia Corthron’s The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter won the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. Thomas Jeffer-son Dreams of Sally Hemings by Stephen O’Connor was long-listed for the prize. The winner was announced at the organization’s Annual Benefit and Awards Dinner on December 6 at the Metropolitan Club.

The 2016 Kirkus Prize finalists included Annie Proulx’s Barkskins, a finalist in the Fiction category. Sherman Alexie’s Thunder Boy Jr., illustrated by Yuyi Morales, and Russell Freedman’s We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement That Defied Adolf Hitler were finalists in the Young People’s Literature category.

The long list for the National Book Awards was an-nounced the week of September 12. Donald Hall was long-listed for The Selected Poems of Donald Hall in the Poetry category. In the Nonfiction category, Patricia Bell-Scott was long-listed for The Firebrand and the First

Lady. Robert Caro was honored at the NBA ceremony in November with the Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Medal.

Rudolfo Anaya and Ron Chernow are among the 12 recipients of the 2015 National Humanities Medal. President Obama presented the medals in conjunc-tion with the National Medals of Arts during a White House ceremony on September 22, 2016.

PEN Center USA has announced the winners and fi-nalists of its 2016 Literary Awards. Chris Barton’s The Amazing Age of John Roy Lynch was a finalist in the Children’s/Young Adult category. Ken Armstrong’s “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” co-written with T. Christian Miller, won in the Journalism category. The awards were presented at PEN Center USA’s 26th an-nual Literary Awards Festival on September 28.

The 2017 PEN America Literary Awards long lists were announced the week of December 5. Brit Bennett’s The Mothers was long-listed for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Jerome Charyn’s A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the 21st Century, Ruth Franklin’s Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life and Joe Jackson’s Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary were listed for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Tess Lewis’s translation of Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap was long-listed for the PEN Translation Prize. Susan Cheever’s Drinking in America: Our Secret History was long-listed for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.

Mia Alvar received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction for her short story collection In the Country.

Gint Aras’s The Fugue was named a finalist for the Chicago Writers Association’s 2016 Book of the Year Award in the category of Traditionally Published Fiction.

Daco Auffenorde’s Electromancer won the 2016 Global Ebook Awards gold medal in the Fantasy/Contem-porary category. Her short story, “The Alexandrite Necklace,” co-authored with Robert Rotstein, won the gold medal in the Short Stories category and the bronze medal in the Horror Fiction category.

Stevanne Auerbach’s My Butterfly Collection: On the Wings of the Butterfly received a 2016 Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA) Book Awards Honorable Mention for Reader Favorites.

Brit Bennett is one of the National Book Foundation’s 2016 “5 Under 35” honorees, for debut fiction that “promises to leave a lasting impression on the literary

M E M B E R S M A K E N E W S


landscape.” Her debut novel, The Mothers, was also named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s 2016 John Leonard Prize and for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction.

Roy Blount Jr., was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame on Monday, November 7, at a ceremony at the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries in Athens, GA.

Anne Bustard’s Anywhere but Paradise was a 2016 WILLA Literary Award finalist for Children’s/YA Fiction and Nonfiction, presented by Women Writing the West, and a finalist for the 2016 Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Children’s Book.

Talia Carner’s Hotel Moscow won the 2015 USA Best Book Award in the Multicultural Fiction category.

Ellen Cassedy received a 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of On the Landing: Selected Stories by Yenta Mash. It is the first Yiddish project to receive support from the PEN/Heim Trans-lation Fund.

Susan Cohen’s second full-length book of poems, A Different Wakeful Animal, won Red Dragonfly Press’s 2015 David Martinson-Meadowhawk Prize.

Deborah Cramer’s The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, an Ancient Crab, and an Epic Journey received the 2016 Keck Communications Best Book Award from the Na tional Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medi cine; the 2016 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists; and the 2016 Reed Environmental Writing Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center; it was also named a Must Read Book in the 2016 Massachusetts Book Awards.

Matt de la Peña won the National Intellectual Free-dom Award from the National Council of Teachers of English. The award is presented to those fighting against censorship through both words and actions. He received the award at the NCTE Annual Convention in Atlanta, Georgia, in November.

Diane Elliott’s verse novel Songs of Bernie Bjørn was named a Kirkus Best Indie Book of 2016.

Elizabeth Fackler-Sinkovitz’s Grand River Highway: One Woman’s Journey to Autonomy was a finalist in the Biography category of the 2016 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards.

Ernest J. Finney’s Elevation: 6,040 won silver in the Fiction category of the California Book Awards for books published in 2015.

Ernest J. Gaines was honored with the 2016 North Star Award, the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation’s “highest honor for career accomplish-

ment and inspiration to the writing community.” The award was presented on October 21 at the Washington Plaza Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Wendy Hinman’s Tightwads on the Loose was awarded the Journey Award for Best True Life Adventure Story by Chanticleer Book Reviews.

Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe by Lori Jakiela won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in the category of Nonfiction.

Suzanne Kamata won the Half the World Global Literati Award in the Best Novel category for her un-published manuscript, Squeaky Wheels.

Jonathan LaPoma’s Developing Minds: An American Ghost Story garnered the bronze medal in the 2016 Florida Authors and Publishers Association President’s Awards in the Adult E-book category.

The winners of Romance Writers of America’s RITA Awards were announced on July 16. Julie Anne Long’s It Started with a Scandal won a RITA in the category of Historical Romance: Short.

Margaret Maron was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame at the Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines on October 16, 2016. The Hall of Fame “celebrates and promotes the state’s rich literary heritage by commemorating its leading authors and encouraging the continued flour-ishing of great literature.”

Sherry Monahan won the Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award for The Cowboy’s Cookbook. The award ceremony took place on Saturday, October 29, in Fort Worth, TX.

Mark Monmonier was inducted into the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association’s GIS Hall of Fame in recognition of his books and research con-tributing to the “development and application of GIS concepts, tools, or resources.”

James McGrath Morris’s Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press won the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change’s National Book Award for 2015. The award celebrates “publications that best advance an understanding of the American civil rights movement and its legacy.”

Carla Norton’s What Doesn’t Kill Her won the 2016 Nancy Pearl Award for Best Book in Genre Fiction, pre-sented by the Pacific Northwest Writers Association, as well as the President’s Book Award Gold Medal for Suspense/Thriller Fiction, bestowed by the Florida Authors and Publishers Association.

Barbara Novack’s Do Houses Dream? was a finalist for the Blue Light Press Poetry Prize.


Joan Saslow’s Top Notch (3rd edition), coauthored with Allen Ascher, has won the Textbook and Academic Authors Association’s 2016 Textbook Excellence Award.

Robert J. Sawyer has been named a member of the Order of Canada, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the Canadian government, for his accomplishments as a science-fiction writer and mentor and for his con-tributions as a futurist.

An Air That Still Kills by Andrew Schneider and David McCumber won three awards at the iBooks Author Conference held in Nashville, TN. The title won Best iBook of the Year; Best iBook of the Year, Nonfiction; and Best iBook of the Year, Education (Science).

E. M. Schorb’s Dates and Dreams won Writer’s Digest’s 2016 Self-Published Award for Poetry.

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout was long-listed for the 2016 Man Booker Prize.

Foreword Reviews’ 2015 INDIEFAB Award winners were announced at the American Library Association’s annual conference in June. Darryl Wimberley’s Paul Bunyan won gold in the category of General Fiction.

Gerald Winter’s “A Free Sampling” won NY Literary Magazine’s 5 Star Award for Meaningful Short Fiction.

My Fair Ladies: Female Robots, Androids, and Other Arti-ficial Eves by Julie Wosk was a runner-up for the 2015 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize, awarded by the University of California, Riverside. ✦

Ann Patchett is one of three recipients of the 2017 Poets & Writers/Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, which recognizes writers who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community. She will be honored at the Poets & Writers Annual Dinner on March 8, 2017.

Fiza Pathan’s Raman and Sunny: Middle School Blues and Classics: Why We Should Encourage Children to Read Them won gold medals at the 2015 Readers’ Favorite International Book Awards. Classics also won a 2015 Beverly Hills Book Award in the Education cate-gory. Pathan’s Amina: The Silent One received several honors, including two awards at the 2015–16 Reader Views Literary Awards: First Place in General Fiction/Novel and the Global Award (Asia). Amina also re-ceived a bronze medal in Realistic Fiction at the 2016 Readers’ Favorite International Book Awards and a 2016 Beverly Hills Book Award in Regional Fiction; plus, it was a finalist for the 2016 Next Generation Indie Book Award. The author’s Nirmala: The Mud Blossom was a solo medalist winner in General Fiction at the 2016 New Apple E-book Awards.

Carla Perry’s Riva Beside Me: New York City 1963–1966 has been turned into a stage play. The debut perfor-mance is scheduled for March 24, 2017, with four performances each weekend through April 8 at the Performing Arts Center in Newport, Oregon.

Melinda Worth Popham’s Grace Period: My Ordination to the Ordinary was named a finalist for the 2016 Next Generation Indie Book Awards in the category of Memoir (Other).

only prices determined by my buying habits, proposed to me by Amazon, while waiting to see my reaction.

Amazon was not offering me the best price avail-able; in fact its offerings were excluding the best prices available. So how does this particular monopoly func-tion to help the customer? Might it not actually cause me economic harm?

Amazon is now one of the largest companies in the world. It wants to be all things to all people, or at least it wants to sell all things to all people. But if it wants to sell the same things at different prices, and wants to sell me books for $50 that it offers to Abigail for $10, then I’d rather find a different source. That feels like harm. ✦

From the President


The Authors Legacy Society

The Authors Legacy Society was created to al-low the Authors Guild’s most loyal supporters to make a commitment to the Guild or its Foundation that lasts beyond their lifetimes. By including the Guild or its Foundation in your estate plans, you can help ensure that its essential work will con-tinue in the years to come. Members of the Society will receive a memento of appreciation and will be listed annually in the Authors Guild Bulletin, unless they choose to remain anonymous. For fur-ther details, including the tax benefits of making a donation, visit authorsguildfoundation.org or call 212 594 7931.


Richard Adams, 96, died December 24 in Oxford, England. The author of Watership Down, one of the most popular children’s books of the 20th century, Adams was the winner of two of Great Britain’s most presti-gious children’s book awards, the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. A success-ful animated film of the beloved children’s novel was made in 1978, and the BBC and Netflix will be re-leasing a new four-part adaptation in 2017.

Natalie Babbitt, 84, died October 31 in Hamden, CT. She was the au-thor and illustrator of more than 20 children’s books, including Tuck Everlasting.

Sally Beauman, 71, died July 11 in Northern England. She was the au-thor of 10 books, mostly fiction, but was best known for her debut novel, Destiny.

E. R . Bra i thwai te , 104 , d ied December 12 in Rockville, MD. The Guyana-born, Oxford- educated scholar and diplomat was the au-thor of the memoir To Sir, With Love, which was adapted into the 1967 film starring Sidney Poitier.

Austin Clarke, 81, died June 26 in Toronto. He was the author of numerous novels, including The Survivors of the Crossing and The Polished Hoe, which won both the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

Michelle Cliff, 69, died June 12 in Santa Cruz, CA. She was the au-thor of fiction, poetry and essays, including such works as Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, The Land of Look Behind, and the memoir Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise.

Judi th Ort iz Cofer , 64 , d ied December 30 in Louisville, GA. She was the author of fiction, poetry and

multigenre works for both adults and children, including The Latin Deli, Silent Dancing and The Meaning of Consuelo.

Anna Dewdney, 50, died September 3 at her home in Chester, VT. Best known for her Llama Llama series, she was the author and illustrator of over 20 books and an advocate for children’s literacy.

Robert F. Dorr, 76, died June 12 at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Northern Virginia. He wrote for the Military Times for nearly two decades and published over 70 books, including Hell Hawks! (which he coauthored with Thomas D. Jones) and Mission to Berlin.

Lois Duncan, 82, died June 15 at her home near Sarasota, FL. A pioneer in the teen suspense genre, she pub-lished nearly 50 books for young adults and children, including I Know What You Did Last Summer and Killing Mr. Griffin.

Donn Fendler, 90, died October 9 in Bangor, ME. He was best known for his nonfiction tale about how he sur-vived nine days in the wilderness, Lost on a Mountain in Maine.

Carrie Fisher, 60, died December 27 in Los Angeles. The actor-turned-bestselling-writer was the author of the biographical novel Postcards from the Edge, the memoir Wishful Drinking and several other works of fiction and nonfiction.

Gavin Frost, 86, died September 11 in Charleston, WV. With his wife, Yvonne Frost, he coauthored nearly two dozen books on witch-craft, magic and other related top-ics. Titles include The Magic Power of Witchcraft and The Good Witch’s Bible.

Barbara Goldsmith, 85, died at her home in Manhattan. She was one of the founding editors of New York magazine and the author of numer-ous works of fiction and nonfiction, including Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last.

I N M E M O R I A M

AUTHORS GUILD MEMBERS

Hillel Moses Black Richard Blum

Thomas G. Crouthamel Gloria T. Delamar

Muriel Dimen Mark Douglas Michael Foster Roberta Gellis

Barbara Goldsmith Lars Gustafsson Joseph S. Iseman

Larry Karp Sidney B. Kramer

Ann LaFarge George Mandler D. Keith Mano

William B. McCloskey Sidney W. Mintz

Neil Morgan Beverly Anderson Nemiro

Renee Paley-Bain Frank S. Ruddy

George N. Rumanes Phyllis Schlafly

Dodi Schultz Pearle H. Schultz Barbara Seuling

William Jay Smith Caroline R. Stutson

Elie Wiesel Linda Wirkner

Guild members who learn of a fellow member’s death are en-couraged to let us know, as we sometimes don’t receive notice from family members until much later.


political activist, LaHaye was the coauthor of the popular Left Behind series.

William H. McNeill, 98, died July 8 in Torrington, CT. A professor of his-tory and a prolific author, McNeill won the National Book Award in 1964 for The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community.

James Alan McPherson, 72, died July 27 in Iowa City. A novelist and writer of short stories and nonfiction, he was the first African-American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which he won in 1978 for his short story collection Elbow Room. At the time of his death, he was professor emeritus at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Gloria Naylor, 66, died September 28 near her home in Christiansted in the Virgin Islands. She won the National Book Award for her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place, and was the author of seven more novels, including Linden Hills, Mama Day and Bailey’s Cafe.

Lucia Perillo, 58, died October 16 in Olympia, WA. She was the author of several essay and poetry collections, including Inseminating the Elephant, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Carolyn See, 82, died July 13 in Santa Monica, CA. She wrote seven novels under her own name, co-wrote three books under the pseudonym Monica Highland, and published four works of nonfiction, including the memoir Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America.

Barbara Seuling, 79, died September 12 in Lebanon, NH. She was the au-

thor and illustrator of many chil-dren’s books including the Robert series and the Freaky Facts series.

Thomas Steinbeck, 72, died August 11 in Santa Barbara, CA. He was the eldest son of John Steinbeck, and the author of Down to a Soundless Sea, The Silver Lotus and In the Shadow of the Cypress.

Cory Taylor , 61, died July 5 in Queens land, Australia. She was an award-winning screenwriter who turned to fiction in the last years of her life, writing Me and Mr. Booker and My Beautiful Enemy.

Joyce Carol Thomas, 78, died Aug 13 at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, CA. She was the author of more than 35 books, including Marked by Fire, which won the National Book Award in 1983.

Alvin Toffler, 87, died June 27 at his home in Los Angeles. The author of 13 books, he was best known for Future Shock and the follow-up vol-umes The Third Wave and Powershift.

William Trevor, 88, died November 20 in Somerset, England. The Irish-born writer was the author of nearly 40 novels and short story collec-tions, including The Old Boys, The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and The Children of Dynmouth.

Elie Wiesel , 87, died July 2 at his home in Manhattan. Born in Romania, Wiesel was the author of 60 books, the best known of which is his Night trilogy—Night (1960), Dawn (1961) and Day (1962)—in which he recounted his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. A lifelong activist and lecturer on the Holocaust, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. ✦

Benoîte Groult, 96, died June 20. The French feminist novelist and ac-tivist was best known for her novel Salt on Our Skin, which was later adapted into a film.

Shirley Hazzard, 85, died December 12 at her home in Manhattan. She was best known for The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire, which won the National Book Award in 2003.

Michael Herr, 76, died June 23 near his home in upstate New York. A Vietnam War correspondent for Esquire from 1967 to 1969, Herr was the author of the revered “nonfiction novel” Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his two years in the field.

Yumi Heo, 52, died November 5. She was the author and illustrator of more than 30 children’s books, in-cluding Rubber Shoes, Lady Hahn and Her Seven Friends and Jibberwillies at Night.

Thom Jones, 71, died October 14 in Olympia, WA. He was best known for the short story collections The Pugilist at Rest and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine.

Larry Karp, 77, died October 11 in Seattle. He was the author of more than a dozen books, including the well-regarded biography Brun Campbell: The Original Ragtime Kid. The last of his nine mystery novels, The Ragtime Traveler, will be pub-lished in June 2017.

W. P. Kinsella, 81, died September 16 in Hope, British Columbia. He was the author of almost 30 books including Shoeless Joe, which became the basis for the film Field of Dreams.

Tim LaHaye, 90, died July 25 in San Diego. An evangelical minister and


B O O K S B Y M E M B E R S

Erica Abeel: Wild Girls; David A. Adler (and Edward Miller, Illus.): Circles; Rennie Airth: The Death of Kings; Rabih Alameddine: The Angel of History; Kathleen Alcala: The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island; Brian Alexander: Glass House: The 1% Economy and the Shattering of the All-American Town; Tasha Alexander: A Terrible Beauty; Annamaria Alfieri: The Idol of Mombasa; R. W. Alley: Mitchell on the Moon; Jill Amadio: Digging Up the Dead; Christine Ammer: Unsung: A History of Women in American Music; Laurie Halse Anderson: Ashes; Jacob M. Appel: Coulrophobia & Fata Morgana: Stories; The Topless Widow of Herkimer Street: Stories; Michael J. Arlen (and Alice Arlen): The Huntress: The Adventures, Escapades, and Triumphs of Alicia Patterson; Aviatrix, Sportswoman, Journalist, Publisher; Sandy Asher (and Mark Fearing, Illus.): Chicken Story Time; Amanda Ashley: Twilight Dreams; Jeannine Atkins: Finding Wonders: Three Girls Who Changed Science; Stone Mirrors: The Sculpture and Silence of Edmonia Lewis; Laura Atkins (and Stan Yogi and Yutaka Houlette, Illus.): Fred Korematsu Speaks Up;

James R. Babb: Fish Won’t Let Me Sleep: The Obsessions of a Lifetime Fly-Fisherman; Jeff Bagel: Annual Fundraising Plans Made Simple: A Roadmap for Community Colleges and Small Development Shops; Robert Bagg (and Mary Bagg): Let Us Watch Richard Wilbur: A Biographical Study; Deirdre Bair: Al Capone: His Life, Legacy, and Legend; Keith Baker: Hap-pea All Year; Mark Allen Baker: Battling Nelson, the Durable Dane: World Lightweight Champion, 1882–1954; Lisa M. Bakos (and Mark Chambers, Illus.): Too Many Moose!; Molly Bang (and Penny Chisholm): Rivers of Sunlight: How the Sun Moves Water Around the Earth; Marge Rogers Barrett: Called: The Making and Unmaking of a Nun; Brunonia Barry: The Fifth Petal; Gordon Basichis: The Cuban Quartet; Mary Batten: Rattler; Robert Bausch: The Legend of Jesse Smoke; Gilbert Benevides: Garden Man; How Strange (Acquiring âme); Shoes for Cooper; Upside Down and Inside Out (The Marlin Affair); What Next; James Benn: Blue Madonna; Robert Bense: River Road: A Mississippiad; Alex Berenson: The Prisoner; Laurence Bergreen: Casanova: The World of a Seductive Genius; Marianne Berkes (and Jill Dubin, Illus.): Over in the Grasslands: On an African Savanna; Adria Bernardi, Transl. (Ubaldo de Robertis, Author): The Rings of the Universe: Selected Poems; Marian Betancourt: Heroes of New York Harbor: Tales from the City’s Port; Lucy Jane Bledsoe: A Thin Bright Line; Wiley Blevins: Ninja Plants: Survival and Adaptation in the Plant World; Barbara Bode: Las Campanas del Silencio; Paulette Bogan: Bossy Flossy; Kathleen Long Bostrom (and Dinara Mirtalipova, Illus.): Stories from the Bible: 15 Treasured Tales from the World’s Greatest Book; Patricia Bosworth: The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love

and Art in 1950s Manhattan; Walter M. Brasch: Fracking America: Sacrificing Health and the Environment for Short-Term Economic Benefit; Alida Brill: Dear Princess Grace, Dear Betty: The Memoir of a Romantic Feminist; John Brockman, Ed.: Know This: Today’s Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments; Nancy Brout: Losing Your Job & Finding Yourself: Memoir, Myths, and Methods for Inventive Career Transitions; Sandra Brown: Sting; Joseph Bruchac: Talking Leaves; Carol Burnett: In Such Good Company: Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem, and Fun in the Sandbox; Marcia Butler: The Skin Above My Knee; Robert Olen Butler: Perfume River;

Meg Cabot: The Boy Is Back; Anne Carson: Float; Mary Carter: Home With My Sisters; Ellen Cassedy, Transl. (and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, Transl.): Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories by Blume Lempel; C. S. Challinor: Judgment of Murder; Mary Higgins Clark (and Alafair Burke): The Sleeping Beauty Killer; Rachel Cohn (and David Levithan): The Twelve Days of Dash and Lily; Michael Connelly: The Wrong Side of Goodbye; Daniel Connolly: The Book of Isaias: A Child of Hispanic Immigrants Seeks His Own America; Sybilla Avery Cook: Drawn Together in Art . . . in Love . . . in Friendships: The Biography of Caldecott Award–Winning Authors Berta and Elmer Hader; Robert Coram: Double Ace: The Life of Robert Lee Scott Jr., Pilot, Hero, and Teller of Tall Tales; Peter Cozzens: The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West; Sharon Creech: Moo; Julie Cross (and Mark Perini): You Before Anyone Else; Shutta Crum (and Lee Wildish, Illus.): William and the Witch’s Riddle;

Anne Margaret Daniel, Ed.: Beauty’s Hour: A Phan tasy (Olivia Shakespear, Author); Steve Danley: Manage-ment Diseases and Disorders: How to Identify and Treat Dysfunctional Managerial Behavior; Patty Dann: The Butterfly Hours: Transforming Memories into Memoir; Jacqueline Davies (and Sydney Hanson, Illus.): Panda Pants; Fiona Davis: The Dollhouse; Arthur Day: The Dog Books: Eight Tails in Noir; Michael de Guzman: I, Maxim Waxman; Melissa de la Cruz: Something in Between; Corinne Demas (and Artemis Roehrig; David Catrow, Illus.): Are Pirates Polite?; Corinne Demas (and Artemis Roehrig; John Sandford, Illus.): Does a Fiddler Crab Fiddle?; Dennis Denenberg (and Lorraine Roscoe): 50 American Heroes Every Kid Should Meet (2nd Revised Edition); Yvonne Dennis (and Arlene Hirschfelder and Shannon Rothenberger Flynn): Native American Almanac: More Than 50,000 Years of the Cultures and Histories of Indigenous Peoples; Phillip DePoy: The English Agent; Carl Deuker: Gutless; Sylviane A. Diouf, Ed. (and Komozi Woodard, Ed.): Black Power 50; Lisa Doan: The Alarming Career of Sir Richard Blackstone; Kathleen Donohoe: Ashes of Fiery


Weather; Ann Douglas: Parenting Through the Storm; Patrick A. Durantou: Dawn Approached; Ensayo Filosofico; Gleich und die Andere; Paths of Knowledge; Sesse e L’Altro; Hugh Dutton: Bad Blood;

Michelle Edwards, and G. Brian Karas, Illus.: A Hat for Mrs. Goldman: A Story About Knitting and Love; Dave Eggers: Heroes of the Frontier; Anne Elizabeth: The Soul of a SEAL; Diane Elliott: When Volcanoes Wake; Susan Middleton Elya (and Juana Martinez-Neal, Illus.): La Madre Goose: Nursery Rhymes for Los Niños; Delia Ephron: Siracusa; Louise Erdrich: Makoons;

Michelle Falkoff: Pushing Perfect; Mary Cronk Farrell: Fannie Never Flinched: One Woman’s Courage in the Struggle for American Labor Union Rights; Sharon Farrow: Dying for Strawberries; Jules Feiffer: Cousin Joseph; Ernest J. Finney: Elevation: 6,040; Paul Fleischman (and Julie Paschkis, Illus.): First Light, First Life: A Worldwide Creation Story; Nancy Bo Flood (and Shonto Begay, Illus.): Soldier Sister, Fly Home; Chris Formant: Bright Midnight; Elizabeth Foxwell, Ed. (Margaret Kinsman, Author): Sara Paretsky: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction; David France: How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS; Ruth Franklin: Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life; Deborah Freedman: Shy; This House, Once; Russell Freedman: Vietnam: A History of the War; Helen Frost (and Amy June Bates, Illus.): Applesauce Weather; Laura Furman, Ed.: The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016;

Kathlyn Gay: Anne Burrell (Celebrity Chefs); Amitav Ghosh: The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable; James Gleick: Time Travel: A History; Krystyna Poray Goddu (and Krystyna Mihulka): Krysia: A Polish Girl’s Stolen Childhood During World War II; Rich Gold (and Breandán Delap): Mad Dog Coll: An Irish Gangster; Connie Goldsmith: Dogs at War: Military Canine Heroes; Understanding Suicide: A National Epidemic; Brad Gooch: Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love; Chris Grabenstein: Welcome to Wonderland (Book 1): Home Sweet Motel; Chris Grabenstein (and James Patterson, and Joe Sutphin, Illus.): Word of Mouse; Elisabeth Graves: Devil’s Key; Jane Green: Falling; Ben Greenman: Emotional Rescue: Essays on Love, Loss, and Life—with a Soundtrack; Ben Greenman (and Brian Wilson): I Am Brian Wilson; Don A. Gregory: Hitler’s Home Front; Nikki Grimes: Garvey’s Choice; One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance; David Grinspoon: Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future; James Grippando: Most Dangerous Place; Lawrence Grobel: You, Talking to Me; Lee Gutkind, Ed.: Show Me All Your Scars: True Stories of Living with Mental Illness;

Christine Hale: A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice: A Memoir in Four Meditations; Parnell Hall: A Puzzle to Be Named Later; R. Z. Halleson: What Happened to Clara?; Jean Halley (and Amy Eshleman): Seeing Straight: An Introduction to Gender

and Sexual Privilege; Patrice Hannon: Black Tom: A Novel of Sabotage in New York Harbor; Terence A. Harkin: The Big Buddha Bicycle Race; Bill Harley (and Adam Gustavson, Illus.): Charlie Bumpers vs. the Puny Pirates; Cheryl Harness: Hillary Clinton: American Woman of the World; Debbie Harris: 365 Christ-Centered Contemplative Poems: Exalting Jesus Christ, Name Above All Names; John Hassett (and Ann Hassett): Goodnight Bob; Georgia Heard: Heart Maps: Helping Students Create and Craft Authentic Writing; The Woman in This Poem: Women’s Voices in Poetry; Carol Hebald: Delusion of Grandeur; Brian Heinz (and Michael Rothman, Illus.): The Great North Woods; Bill Henderson, Ed.: The Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses 2017; Charles Henderson: Terminal Impact; Carl Hiaasen: Razor Girl; Bruce J. Hillman: A Plague on All Our Houses: Medical Intrigue, Hollywood, and the Discovery of AIDS; Alice Hoffman: Faithful; Cara Hoffman: Running; Jennifer S. Holland: Unlikely Friendships: Dogs; Ellen Hopkins: The You I’ve Never Known; Abeer Y. Hoque: Olive Witch; James D. Hornfischer: The Fleet at Flood Tide: America at Total War in the Pacific, 1944–1945; Margot Horwitz: From Kimchi to Pizza: My Little Brother’s Adoption Story; Dean Hughes: Four-Four-Two; Joseph Hutchison: The World as Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972–2015;

Ellen Jackson (and Robin Page, Illus.): Octopuses One to Ten; Joe Jackson: Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary; Eloisa James: Seven Minutes in Heaven; Peter James: Love You Dead; Tama Janowitz: Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction; Steven Jonas: Ending the “Drug War”: Solving the Drug Problem; J. Sydney Jones: The Edit; Merry Jones: Child’s Play; Jill Jonnes: Urban Forests: A Natural History of Trees and People in the American Cityscape; Ward Just: The Eastern Shore;

Michael A. Kahn: The Dead Hand; Robert Kanigel: Eyes on the Streets: The Life of Jane Jacobs; Robert D. Kaplan: Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World; Leslie Karst: A Measure of Murder; Daria Kelleher: The Imp Bottle; Joyce Keller: Why Am I Here?; Kitty Kelley (and Stanley Tretick, Photog.): Martin’s Dream Day; Christine Kendall: Riding Chance; Liza Ketchum: The Life Fantastic: A Novel in Three Acts; Brendan Kiely: The Last True Love Story; Eric A. Kimmel (and Maria Surducan, Illus.): Gabriel’s Horn; Eric A. Kimmel (and Monica Gutierrez, Illus.): Little Red Rosie; Stephanie Ager Kirz: Signs of Life, Love, and Other Miracles; Katie Kitamura: A Separation; Elisa Kleven: The Horribly Hungry Gingerbread Boy: A San Francisco Story; Christina Baker Kline: A Piece of the World; Sheelah Kolhatkar: Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street; Philip Kopper: America’s National Gallery of Art; Deborah Kops: Alice Paul and the Fight for Women’s Rights: From the Vote to the Equal Rights Amendment; Anne Korkeakivi: Shining Sea; Phyllis Korkki: The Big Thing: How to Complete


African Svelte: Ingenious Misspellings That Make Surprising Sense; Christopher Merrill: Self-Portrait with Dogwood; K. H. Mezek: Book of Angels; Richard Michelson (and Karla Gudeon, Illus.): The Language of Angels: A Story About the Reinvention of Hebrew; Andrew Miller: If Only the Names Were Changed; Ben Miller: The Aliens Are Coming! Behind Our Search for Life in the Universe; Claudia Mills (and Katie Kath, Illus.): The Trouble with Babies; Claudia Mills: Write This Down; Eugene Mirabelli: Renato After Alba; Anne Elizabeth Moore (and the Ladydrawers, Illus.): Threadbare: Clothes, Sex & Trafficking; Stephen Moore (and Cerphe Colwell): Cerphe’s Up: A Musical Life with Bruce Springsteen, Little Feat, Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, CSNY, and Many More; Marissa Moss: Caravaggio: Painter on the Run; Diane Mulcahy: The Gig Economy: The Complete Guide to Getting Better Work, Taking More Time Off, and Financing the Life You Want; Sabina Murray: Valiant Gentlemen;

Weam Namou: Healing Wisdom for a Wounded World: My Life-Changing Journey Through a Shamanic School; Donna Jo Napoli (and Christina Balit, Illus.): Tales from the Arabian Nights: Stories of Adventure, Magic, Love, and Betrayal; Lisa Napoli: Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away; Caroline Nastro (and Vanya Nastanlieva, Illus.): The Bear Who Couldn’t Sleep; David Neilsen (and Terry Will, Illus.): Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom; Craig Nelson: Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness; Donald F. Nelson: Chappaquiddick Tragedy: Kennedy’s Second Passenger Revealed; Alyson Noël: Five Days of Famous; Barbara Novack: Do Houses Dream?;

Carol O’Connell: Blind Sight; Kevin O’Connell: Beyond Derrynane: A Novel of Eighteenth Century Europe; Susan Oleksiw: When Krishna Calls;

Maxine Paetro (and James Patterson): Woman of God; Ann Patchett: Commonwealth; Loren E. Pedersen: A Simple Approach to French Pronunciation: A Comprehensive Guide; Dev Petty (and Mike Boldt, Illus.): I Don’t Want to Be Big; Louis Picone: The President Is Dead! The Extraordinary Stories of the Presidential Deaths, Final Days, Burials, and Beyond; Jodi Picoult: Small Great Things; Michael Pirrung: Handbook of Synthetic Organic Chemistry (2nd Edition); Sally J. Pla (and Julie McLaughlin, Illus.): The Someday Birds; Judy Polumbaum, Ed. (and Ted Polumbaum, Photog.): Juxtapositions: Images from the Newseum Ted Polumbaum Photo Collection; John Pomfret: The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present; Douglas Preston: The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story; Douglas Preston (and Lincoln Child): The Obsidian Chamber; Alex Prud’homme: The French Chef in America: Julia Child’s Second Act; Robin Pulver (and Lynn Rowe Reed, Illus.): Me First! Prefixes Lead the Way; Lydia Pyne: Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World’s Most Famous Human Fossils;

Your Creative Project Even if You’re a Lazy, Self-Doubting Procrastinator Like Me; Gordon Korman: Jingle; Stephen Krensky (and Lynn Munsinger, Illus.): Dinosaurs in Disguise; Bobi Kress: Organisms That Glow;

Patricia Lakin: Skateboards; Wally Lamb: I’ll Take You There; Kirby Larson: Audacity Jones Steals the Show; Liberty; Mary Lawrence: Death at St. Vedast; Jeff Layton: The Good Spy; John le Carré: The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life; Eve Leder: Casual Bead Elegance, Stitch by Stitch; Caroline Leech: Wait for Me; Ursula K. Le Guin: Words Are My Matter: Books, 2000–2016, with A Journal of a Writer’s Week; Marti Leimbach: Age of Consent; Nita Leland: Exploring Color Workshop (30th Anniversary Edition); John Lescroart: Fatal; Ron Leshnower: President Trump’s Month: An Epistolary Novella; Joan Steiner Lester: The Future of White Men and Other Diversity Dilemmas; Elizabeth Letts: The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis; Gail Carson Levine: Transient; Daniel J. Levitin: A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age; Debbie Levy (and Elizabeth Baddeley, Illus.): I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark; Jim Lindl: Mr. Teasel, My Hero; David Lindsay: Other Grounds: Breaking Free of the Correlationist Circle; Elinor Lipman: On Turpentine Lane; Robert Littell: The Mayakovsky Tapes; Sarah Darer Littman: In Case You Missed It; Kristine Lombardi, Illus. ( Victoria J. Coe, Author): Fenway and Hattie and the Evil Bunny Gang; Julie Anne Long: Wild at Whiskey Creek; Lois Lowry: Looking Back: A Book of Memories; Mike Lupica: Last Man Out;

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Xu Xi: That Man in Our Lives;

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Susan Quinn: Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady;

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Carole Bayer Sager: They’re Playing Our Song; John Sandford: Escape Clause; Maral Sassouni, Illus. (Jackie Azúa Kramer, Author): The Green Umbrella; George Saunders: Lincoln in the Bardo; Julie Scelfo: The Women Who Made New York; Andrew Schneider (and David McCumber): An Air That Still Kills: How a Montana Town’s Asbestos Tragedy Is Spreading Nationwide; E. M. Schorb: Dates and Dreams; Paul Schullery: Diamond Jubilee: Sherlock Holmes, Mark Twain, and the Peril of the Empire; Will Schwalbe: Books for Living; Brenda Seabrooke: Scones and Bones on Baker Street: Sherlock’s Dog (Maybe!) and the Dirt Dilemma; Stephanie Shaw (and Kevin M. Barry, Illus.): Schnitzel: A Cautionary Tale for Lazy Louts; Delia Sherman: The Evil Wizard Smallbone; Susie Shubert: The Badass Planner; Randy Siegel (and Serge Bloch, Illus.): One Proud Penny; Judy Sierra and G. Brian Karas, Illus.: Make Way for Readers; Jeffrey Siger: Santorini Caesars; Daniel Silva: The Black Widow; Erica Silverman (and Laure Fournier, Illus.): Wake Up, City!; Matthew Silverman: One-Year Dynasty: Inside the Rise and Fall of the 1986 Mets, Baseball’s Impossible One-and-Done Champions; Anita Silvey: Let Your Voice Be Heard: The Life and Times of Pete Seeger; Andrea Simon: Esfir Is Alive; Seymour Simon: Insects; Marilyn Singer (and David Litchfield, Illus.): Miss Muffet, or What Came After; Marilyn Singer (and Greg Pizzoli, Illus.): What’s a Banana?; David J. Skal: Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote “Dracula”; Karin Slaughter: The Kept Woman; Teri Sloat (and Rosalinde Bonnet, Illus.): Pablo in the Snow; Caylen


Harlequin Lawsuit’s Happy EndingBy Patricia McLinn

A $4.1m class action settlement be-tween Harlequin, the world’s largest romance publisher, and 1,200 of its authors won approval on June 30, 2016 from the United States Dis-trict Court for the Southern District Court of New York. The class con-sisted of all Harlequin authors who signed book contracts with Harlequin between 1990 and 2004. The lawsuit, filed in July 2012, stemmed from Harlequin’s prac-tice of sublicensing e-book rights through a subsidiary, which resulted in authors receiving 3 to 4 percent of net profits from their works rather than the contractual 50 percent.

When originally posting the news of the lawsuit to the Authors Guild website on July 1, we spoke of the case from the Guild’s perspec-tive, having assisted the attorneys from behind the scenes. Patricia McLinn contacted us after our post and let us in on the following story, which recounts how a few groups of dedicated authors worked tirelessly to pull the case together and bring the matter to court.

Sitting in front of me is the settlement check I received from a class action lawsuit

against Harlequin. Because the lawsuit was settled out of court, there was no winner legally. That’s not how it feels. Not at all. Let me tell you, the authors won.

In the BeginningIn spring 2011 a group of authors shepherded by Ginger Chambers and Barbara McMahon—with me as part of the flock—hired Elaine English as our attor-ney to make a legal assessment of clauses governing e-book rights in various Harlequin contracts. Under contracts that spanned several years before e-books

became truly commercially viable, e-book rights were lumped under “All Other Rights.” These contracts had been written and signed years earlier, but because of the duration of Harlequin contracts they were still in

force. And the “All Other Rights” clause said Harlequin and the author would split whatever monies came in from the exercise of these rights 50-50.

When books signed under those contracts were later digi-tized, however, it became clear the authors were getting way, way, way less than their 50 per-cent share. Harlequin’s expla-nation was that our contracts had been signed with Harlequin Switzerland, but the e-books were published by Harlequin Toronto, and golly gee, Harlequin Switzerland sold the rights to Harlequin Toronto for 6 percent of the cover price. So Harlequin Toronto sent Switzerland 6 per-cent, Switzerland kept 3 percent, the author received 3 percent . . . and Harlequin Toronto kept all the rest. (By the way, this agreement between the various Harlequins surfaced well after the contracts were signed; au-thors were never informed about it.)

After the original group of authors disbanded, I formed a second one (that’s another story that I won’t bore you with un-less we’re in a bar somewhere some night, though the group did some definite good for many Harlequin authors). An offshoot

of that second ad hoc group of authors, led by Day Leclaire, pooled our money and hired lawyer David Wolf of David Wolf Law, PLLC, to talk to Harlequin about living up to its contract. A word about Harlequin contracts: they are essentially not negotiable, with ex-tremely limited exceptions. You might be stunned to see a list of the major authors Harlequin could have kept if it had been willing to negotiate a bit. It chose instead to let those authors walk. You either accept the contract as Harlequin writes it or you don’t publish with Harlequin. (The latter became my choice around 2008.) The company was able to do this because of the

“Because the lawsuit was settled

out of court, there was no winner

legally. That’s not how it feels. . . .

Let me tell you, the authors won.”

—Patricia McLinn


grasp much of anything about the issues. How could we hope to fare better than the first time around with him? Within the month, that judge died as the result of a fall. I am not kidding you.

Turning PointThe new judge took a different approach. In October 2014, the 1,200 authors affected by the contract clause were certified as a class. There was champagne that day.

The work wasn’t over. There was discovery. There were depositions. Harlequin subpoenaed at least two authors groups, demanding from one of them all com-munications among its members. So much for privacy. It required an onerous effort for a volunteer-run orga-nization to gather all the information and, as expected, it got Harlequin nowhere.

If I were writing this in a novel, I’d let the reader know that the big corporation had done it just be-cause it could—to punish those upstart authors in any way possible. Finally, in June 2016, a settlement of the Harlequin lawsuit was announced. While maintain-ing that it had never done anything wrong, Harlequin agreed to pay $4.1 million. The settlement checks from the Harlequin lawsuit began arriving in authors’ mail-boxes Monday, September 12.

The checks are nice. Very nice. But let me tell you when the authors really won.

It was back in July 2011. I told a few fellow authors that I was going to write a letter to Harlequin through Elaine English to let the company know that I was not as stupid as it thought. Several of the authors said, “We want in on that, too, and we’ll share the expense.” One author, Susan Gable, said she’d start an online group for us. I said, “We don’t need an online group. It will only be a handful of us.” She was right. I was wrong. By the end of the week, we had a hundred members. I remember tears coming into my eyes when we topped three hundred. And more came.

Most vividly, I remember tears from some of the communications from these authors. They were risk-ing their livelihoods, but felt they had to join the group because what Harlequin was doing was simply wrong. Some had written for Harlequin for 30 years or more; they felt betrayed and would never write for them again. Others had just achieved their dream of selling their first book to Harlequin and they were scared, but this was too important to ignore. They were from all over the United States and Canada, from the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. A few couldn’t afford the $35 each of us chipped in to start, but would send me $5 a month until they had paid their share. Some wrote checks for well over their share to help cover those who struggled to pay.

structure and business climate of publishing at that time. I had a few excellent editors among the 34 I had for 25 books (yes, you read that right . . . editor turn-over might lead some to suspect Harlequin didn’t treat its editors well, either), but my overall experience with Harlequin was, let’s say, “not good.” After 19 years with the publisher I was disheartened, depressed and done. I didn’t think I would write for publication ever again. I didn’t even want to try.

By 2011, however, I was back on track. I was pub-lishing backlist books as an indie, writing again, and publishing those new books as an indie. And, thanks to Harlequin’s machinations, a good jolt of indigna-tion helped return me to my feisty self. My reaction to what Harlequin was doing was summed up when, after reading one of the company’s missives to authors that summer, I said aloud, “How stupid do you think I am?” The answer turned out to be a whole lot stupider than I am—or than most authors are. But it took quite a while to make that point to Harlequin. I’m not sure the publishing house gets it even now.

Certainly in late 2011, the powers that be thought they could make David Wolf and those pesky authors go away by refusing to talk. We didn’t go away.

From Talking to SuingDavid Wolf, bless his heart, took on the case as a po-tential class action lawsuit, Keiler v. Harlequin, which he, along with Michael Boni and John Sindoni of Boni & Zack, LLC, filed in July 2012. The three named plain-tiffs on whose behalf the suit was filed were authors Barbara Keiler (who writes as Judith Arnold), Linda Barrett and Gay Wilson (who publishes as Gayle Wilson).

Harlequin’s reaction? “This is the first we’ve heard of it.” That is what’s known in writing as a Big Fat Lie. Remember, David Wolf had been talking to the com-pany for the better part of a year at that point.

The suit had plenty of twists and turns. At one point, in 2013, it was completely dismissed. The law-yers decided to appeal. Mind you, they were Not Paid a Cent all this time. Once they started down the class action road, all the work was done on contingency. (Yes, they’ve been paid out of the settlement now—getting nowhere near what they could have earned through ordinary billable hours for the years of work they put into this.)

In spring 2014, the appeals court upheld the most important element of the case, and the next day, the sale of Harlequin to HarperCollins was announced. How would that affect things? We had no idea.

The appeals court sent the case back to the same judge, who to my nonlegal eye, had not seemed to


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Council

Ex Officio and Honorary Council MembersBARBARA TAYLOR BRADFORD SUSAN CHEEVER

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MARY RASENBERGER, Executive Director MARTHA FAY, Bulletin Editor

The Authors Guild, the oldest and largest association of published authors in the United States, works to protect and promote the professional interests of its members. The Guild’s forerunner, The Authors League of America, was founded in 1912.

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And those in the subgroup that first hired David Wolf became warriors. They collected, organized and dug through contracts and correspondence. They taught themselves legal concepts. They searched cor-porate reports. They asked brilliant questions. They did what needed to be done.

You will notice that those three hundred plus au-thors were about a quarter of the class. The remaining nine hundred owe much gratitude to David, Michael and John, to Day, Barbara, Linda and Gay. They also owe gratitude to those three hundred plus.

Precedents SetAnd here’s something those three hundred plus will have forever—the knowledge that they were part of a group of authors who came together, stood up and said, This Isn’t Right.

There is no legal precedent set by this case. But

there is that precedent of pulling together, and it’s a powerful one.

I hope Harlequin and all publishers take notice, so that it is not necessary to do this again. Even more, I hope authors take notice, in case it is.

Okay, and the check’s not bad either. ✦

Patricia McLinn is a USA Today bestselling author of mystery and romance novels. An editor at The Washington Post for 23 years, she published tradition-ally for 25 years, became a hybrid author and is now indie. The latest of her 40-something titles is Look Live, the fifth book in the Caught Dead in Wyoming series, released December 2016.

This piece was originally published as a blog on the author’s website, www.PatriciaMcLinn.com, on September 14, 2016. It appears here in a lightly edited version with the permission of Ms. McLinn.

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